Sean Whitton <[email protected]> writes: > Hello, > > Simon Josefsson [08/Jan 8:41am +01] wrote: >> I think this will be revisited in discussion again and again, because it >> is not a simple technical matter with a simple solution, but there is >> one approach that I didn't see suggested how to deal with this: >> >> Instead of rewriting git history: prune it. That is, get upstream to >> remove offensive non-DFSG material from their git project in the first >> place, and then start an Debian upstream-code branch from that commit. >> >> Yes, older branches will still contain non-DFSG content, but at least >> the "modern" branch that we use for building will not contain non-DFSG >> content, even in the git history. >> >> I think this is an acceptable and practical approach that will meet even >> the most stringent reviews from anyone who is concerned about having >> non-DFSG content in a git branch. >> >> This approach can also be adopted to deal with really large upstream git >> projects. >> >> As for what to do with old branches, it doesn't really matter. There >> are fewer reasonable arguments for not preserving factual history. >> (Although snapshot.debian.org's removal of some old files may be >> reasonable, or it may not..) > > Well, yes, but upstram will probably just refuse to do that.
I have had a couple of examples of getting upstream Go projects to do that, and I don't recall anyone refusing so far. [1] is the closest to a refusal that I have got, but it seems more lack of time (and lack of a concrete patch). Examples has included pre-compiled binaries, unnecessary vendored code, third-party non-free documentation, and copies of the https://developercertificate.org/ file. And maybe some other corner cases that lintian complained about that I forwarded upstream. There are known philosophical disagreements, for example around the GNU Emacs manual, but otherwise I think many upstreams are supportive to make their git repositories directly usable for downstream. Debian isn't alone to worry about these aspects. /Simon [1] https://github.com/Foxboron/sbctl/issues/477
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