Source: debianutils
Severity: serious
Justification: FTBFS when making a derived work, contrary to the spirit
 of the Debian Social Contract
Version: 5.5-1
User: ubuntu-de...@lists.ubuntu.com
Usertags: origin-ubuntu jammy

Hi,

If I patch the debianutils source package, then I find that I cannot
easily rebuild it without the following files from Salsa VCS that are
not included in the Debian source package:

    po4a/de/translator_german.add
    po4a/fr/savelog.8.fr.add
    po4a/fr/translator_french.add
    po4a/fr/which.1.fr.add
    po4a/ja/translator_japanese.add
    po4a/pl/translator_polish.add
    po4a/sl/translator_slovene.add
    po4a/po/de.po
    po4a/po/es.po
    po4a/po/fr.po
    po4a/po/it.po
    po4a/po/ja.po
    po4a/po/pl.po
    po4a/po/pt.po
    po4a/po/sl.po

Everything is fine if I rebuild the package unmodified. But the build
fails when I patch the package to run "autoreconf" because these files
are missing.

As a result, I wouldn't consider the debianutils Debian source package
to be truly the source, contrary to my expectation that it should be. I
think this fails the spirit of the "desert island test" since someone on
a desert island with a Debian release containing all source packages
would not be able to straightforwardly modify Makefile.am, run
autoreconf and rebuild debianutils. I think the same applies to anyone
who wishes to adjust the translations.

Please could you arrange to ship these missing files in the source
package?

I discovered this while looking to patch debianutils in Ubuntu, but I
think the issue stands in Debian alone, under its own policies. As a
workaround, I just patched these files (grabbed from Salsa) back in, and
that worked fine.

Thanks!

Robie

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