Didier 'OdyX' Raboud writes ("Re: jquery debate with upstream"): > I disagree: I don't think it's tolerable to ship a .exe freeware [0] in > a source package in main, just because it happens to be redistributable; > in my reading, considering that the "source package" _is_ a component of > the Debian system, doing so violates at least SC§1 and DFSG§2. I don't > think there should be a standards' difference between our source and > binary packages.
I have a completely different approach to the DFSG. The DFSG is not carefully drafted document and it doesn't stand up to detailed legalistic interpretation. Rather, it is a statement of aims and values. When interpreting it, we need to primarily consider its underlying purpose - and, ultimately, the underlying purpose of the whole project. That purpose is to improve the freedom of software users (and to an extent developers) by providing an operating system which they can (individually and collectively) examine, modify and share. If an interpretation of the DFSG suggests that we should be doing work which does not further those objectives, then I think that interpretation is a misreading. Conversely, if an interpretation of the DFSG suggests that we should tolerate a situation which undermines the freedom of our users, then that would be a subversion of our values. No-one has come up with any practical benefit from the repacking of source tarballs to remove nonfree files. The requirement to be sure that these nonfree files aren't unwittingly relied on by our build processes could be easily achieved by removing them in clean targets, filtering in dpkg-source, or whatever. If we are worried that users might be misled about the status of these files, filtering them out in dpkg-source would suffice. The result would be that the only people who saw them would be people who are using our archive as a convenient location to fetch the upstream tarball. I would argue that everyone's freedom is served, rather than hindered, by having those people come to us for that (as it is in a similar way for the nonfree archive sections). Ian. -- 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/21280.23051.488968.947...@chiark.greenend.org.uk