On Fri, 14 Jun 2024 at 09:12:56 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> I don't think a shallow copy will work generally. Instead you want
> to upload the entire upstream git repository as a bundle.
I believe this has been specifically ruled out by the ftp team in the past.
With a tarball or a shallow bundle, the maintainer and the ftp team are
"only" responsible for ensuring and verifying that everything in the
current state of the tree is Free according to the DFSG (which is already
a significant task, but we usually manage to achieve it). If the upstream
project contains non-Free content, the maintainer can simply delete it
and repack the tarball (or export a new shallow bundle, in git world)
and the ftp team will be happy with that.
With the whole git history as a bundle, and our current policies around
Freeness, the maintainer and the ftp team would be responsible for
ensuring and verifying that every past commit reachable from the bundle
is *also* Free, which is a much, much larger task - and every time some
past commit contained non-Free content, the maintainer would have to
amend that commit to remove it, and then rebase the rest of the history
from that point onward (including merges!) onto the amended commit.
I don't think shipping full history in the archive would be feasible
unless we were willing to (do a GR to) relax our policies on the handling
of non-Free content in packages' history.
Having full history would also make it harder to detect and remove
non-distributable (e.g. copyright-infringing) content, in the rarer cases
where that gets into a project.
smcv
