[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo] > If you agree that "source-is-missing" also applies in those cases, do > you also think that we should immediately declare all source packages > in Debian containing a 'configure' script as somehow non free (unless > we can check unambigously that they were generated by the .ac)
There's 2 reasons to care if configure was built from the configure.ac in the tarball. The immediately practical reason is to ensure that if we or our users need to patch it, we can patch the actual source, and still be able to build correctly. (These things do tend to bitrot if you don't watch them.) Basically that means always rebuilding from source - which is already a best practice in Debian. Not every package does it, but IMO every package _should_. The other reason to care is of course to comply with our free software guidelines. For that purpose, I think it's entirely reasonable to assume good faith in upstream. If we find out that some upstream intentionally tricks us by shipping a mismatching configure, just so they can point and laugh at the DFSG violation, the solution is very simple: remove the package from Debian, because such upstreams clearly can't be trusted not to trick us in more malicious ways. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140426232014.gd4...@p12n.org
