Others have explained why this is not a critical bug in this specific case. (Although as an aside it seems quite incomprehensible to me that these projects, and Gnome in general, have effectively thrown away the source!)
But there was one misunderstanding here which I think is important to correct: Manterola writes ("Re: 25+2 packages with (Glade) generated C source files without the source"): > On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Sami Liedes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > [ stuff ] > > No. .c files are still source code. This is not correct. `Source code' means (in the words of the GPL) the preferred form for modification. In many programs the .c code is automatically generated from some other input in the source tree. Compilers for some languages even work by translating the source code to C and feeding it to a C compiler. The output from code generators and language translators is not source, even though it may be in C (or some other language that humans sometimes write). So Sami was right to suspect that there was a serious problem here and to investigate. Whether something is source or not cannot be determined simply by looking at which language it is written in. The question is: if we wanted to edit this, which file would we need to change ? If someone somewhere still has the input file, and is generating new versions of the output, then the input file is still the preferred form for modification. If the input file is completely lost, or the output file has been directly edited to the point where the input file is no longer relevant, then the output file has become the source code. I would say that _at the time when these projects were first shipped_ in this state, it _was_ a clear violation (both of our principles and of the GPL) to do so. If we had noticed at the time that the source was missing, and insisted that it was provided and that the package should be built from it, the source would not now be lost. > We might ask authors to include their .glade files, IF they still have > them (if they don't, then the .c files have already become the actual > source code). If the .glade files can still be found, and the glade2 translator resurrected and plumbed back into the build system of these programs, we would be in a much better position. As Sami says, many of these programs are effectively immutable because editing the autogenerated C is impractical. But that's a lot of work. I'm not sure it can be done sensibly in time for lenny. If such changes _can_ be made in time then they're probably pretty safe. After all the output from glade2's code generator can be compared with the current manually-edited files. I'm not sure if the RMs would agree :-). Ian. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]