On 20.06.24 15:52, Gerardo Ballabio wrote:
And tag2upload isn't a step towards fixing that, because (as I understand, correct me if I'm wrong) it too builds packages that only contain the current version.
On the other hand, dgit does send the git tag to an append-only archive.Conceivably we could point people to that service and say "here's the complete source" and drop our mirrored source archive entirely.
Furthermore, there's another issue regarding the freeness of the package: if the source must include the history, then you aren't actually completely free to modify the source, because you can't delete the history.
The concept of "source code" isn't as clear cut as one might wish. The GPL only states that source is whatever you actually touch when you to modify the program. That describes a directory tree with a bunch of text files which you run "make" or "debuild -b" or … in. No VCS mentioned, thus not required. Licenses are funny that way.
The history is obviously irrelevant for editing per se. It's one source for deciding what to change (and how), and it's used to organize and distribute these changes afterwards. But that part isn't covered by any license; you want to be unhelpful, well, push a "3.0 (native)" tree to the archive and let whoever wants to track your changes puzzle them out, not a problem as far as the GPL is concerned.
-- -- regards -- -- Matthias Urlichs
OpenPGP_signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
