Package: dosemu
Version: 1.4.0+svn.2080-1
Severity: important
Dear Maintainer,
dosemu's source package contains pre-compiled binaries of an ancient GNU
File Utilities (nowadays called GNU Core Utilities) for DOS which are
not compiled from source at build time (although the sources are
available) but are copied as binaries into the binary package:
/tmp/dosemu-1.4.0+svn.2080 $ ls -l freedos
total 4356
-rw-r--r-- 1 abe abe 1205628 May 30 2007 dosemu-freedos-1.0-bin.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 abe abe 3248833 May 30 2007 dosemu-freedos-1.0-sources.tgz
/tmp/dosemu-1.4.0+svn.2080 $ tar tzvf freedos/dosemu-freedos-1.0-bin.tgz |
fgrep gnu
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2003-09-19 23:42 dosemu/freedos/gnu/
-rw-r--r-- root/root 37644 1990-09-19 18:50 dosemu/freedos/gnu/tac.exe
-rw-r--r-- root/root 20028 1990-09-19 18:35 dosemu/freedos/gnu/cmp.exe
-rw-r--r-- root/root 17868 1990-09-19 18:32 dosemu/freedos/gnu/cat.exe
-rw-r--r-- root/root 17948 1990-09-19 18:38 dosemu/freedos/gnu/cut.exe
-rw-r--r-- root/root 27138 1990-09-24 06:42 dosemu/freedos/gnu/grep.exe
-rw-r--r-- root/root 27756 1990-09-19 18:44 dosemu/freedos/gnu/ls.exe
-rw-r--r-- root/root 19820 1990-09-23 03:50 dosemu/freedos/gnu/rm.exe
-rw-r--r-- root/root 20188 1990-09-19 18:51 dosemu/freedos/gnu/tail.exe
-rw-r--r-- root/root 16572 1990-09-19 18:43 dosemu/freedos/gnu/head.exe
-rw-r--r-- root/root 23100 1990-09-19 18:46 dosemu/freedos/gnu/mv.exe
-rw-r--r-- root/root 26780 1990-09-19 18:38 dosemu/freedos/gnu/cp.exe
There may be other such binaries, too, but for these, the issue is
obvious:
C:\>ls +version
GNU ls, Version 1.4.0.2 (compiled Sep 19 1990 12:43:10 for MS-DOS)
C:\>
While DFSG as well as the Debian policy just seem to require the sources
to be present (seems so in dosemu-freedos-1.0-sources.tgz), FTP Masters
want binaries in (binary and source[1]) packages to be compiled from
source at build time -- also for contrib. (Confirmed on IRC by one of
the FTP Masters.)
[1] See e.g. the discussion about the waf binary in source packages and
the resulting lintian test at
http://lintian.debian.org/tags/source-contains-waf-binary.html
I though see that this may be less trivial to do for DOS binaries and
that having common GNU file utilities inside dosemu's FreeDOS is crucial
for most Linux users (including me), even if the version of the
utilities is more than 20 years old.
Nevertheless it seems just wrong to ship binaries compiled at a time
before the first line of Linux source code has been written.
We even don't know exactly where these binaries were built or who built
them. (I'd be happy if someone would prove me wrong here. :-)
README.bindist-sources from dosemu-freedos-1.0-sources.tgz just says:
The dosemu team itself has not compiled everything from those sources,
but most are copied and stripped down (deleting files and symlinking
duplicates) to tailor a minimal system. This work has been done
manually (no script) and the resulting tree is simply tar'ed to build
dosemu-freedos-bin.tgz.
The further referenced
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/gnuish/gnuish93/ still
seems to exist, though.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (900, 'testing'), (600, 'stable'), (200,
'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 3.5-trunk-686-pae (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Versions of packages dosemu depends on:
ii libasound2 1.0.25-4
ii libc6 2.13-35
ii libgpm2 1.20.4-6
ii libsdl1.2debian 1.2.15-5
ii libslang2 2.2.4-15
ii libsndfile1 1.0.25-5
ii libx11-6 2:1.5.0-1
ii libxext6 2:1.3.1-2
ii libxxf86vm1 1:1.1.2-1
ii xfonts-utils 1:7.7~1
dosemu recommends no packages.
dosemu suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
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