2008/6/24 Laszlo (Laca) Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 23:07 -0500, Shawn Walker wrote: >> The important thing to remember is that *a* package is better than *no >> package*. Sometimes users won't have a good build recipe. Those >> packages shouldn't be excluded from availability simply because there >> is not an easily-reproduceable build recipe. > > I think that's a perfectly good reason to be excluded from /contrib. > It's also a requirement of the most commonly used licenses. > I'm not talking about pkgbuild recipes, but some sort of documented > way of building the binaries and access to the sources has to be > a requirement for /contrib to have any value.
A documented process is nice, but I don't think it should be required. I also don't believe that source code should be required either (at least when the source code is not available). I'll give you an example: I maintain a closed-source, but free to use, port of an Adventure Game engine that someone else wrote. The author of the original software has been kind enough to share access to his source code with me for the past four to five years. I believe I should be able to contribute a package for it so that users can enjoy it. I would have no problem with it being marked somehow as "non-free" or "no source available. Ubuntu has many binary-only things in their repository for which no source code is available; I don't see why (within reason) it can't be the same for us. > I would also make peer review of any code changes a requirement. I don't think requiring peer review of any code changes is always a reasonable requirement. There is no guarantee that anyone but the upstream source is qualified to say whether a change is good or bad. It might be reasonable to say that "any deviations from the upstream source require approval" -- say to prevent things like the OpenSSL fiasco that happened with Debian. -- Shawn Walker _______________________________________________ pkg-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/pkg-discuss
