On 24 Apr 2006, Ben Pfaff spake thusly:
> Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>> Also, other people doing what I consider unethical is not
>> really much of a motivating factor for me to follow the same
>> unethical practice. I might not be haranguing other folks, since
>> there ethos may well differ from mine, but I am not alone in
>> considering fake "upstream" versions to imply that there is a dfsgf
>> free upstream version of the package as deceptive.
>
> I can see that it is confusing to change the version number, but
> I don't see why it is unethical. When I repackaged Autoconf to
> drop the documentation, I added a suffix to the version number.
> In retrospect I would have chosen a suffix different from the one
> I did choose, but I didn't think then that it was an unethical
> thing to do, nor do I think so now. It's confusing and
> undesirable, but not, in my opinion, unethical.
In my opinion, when I talk about package foo, with an upstream
version bar, I really mean that upstream released such a version (in
case of CVS, it is an informal "release", but it is still upstream
code). The things it is OK to repackage have been trivial, arguably
mistake, parts of the package CVS directories, etc (I am ignoring
repackagin things in formats like zip or arj). This is not the case
here.
In this case, there have been deeply felt and vehement
protests for Debian removing a critical subset of the software
shipped with make/gnus, with people appealing to keep the code
together with the docs even if it meant removing the package to
non-free. Upstream is strongly opposed to removing the non-free
documentation; to imply this is upstreams project (with a perhaps
unreleased version) seems deceptive to my eyes.
Add to that the fact that it is not just files that are
removed; there are build system changes, readme files are edited to
remove references to sthings not shipped any more, this is a full
fork.
Not acknowledging it in the package name, but pretending it is
just a new upstream version, bothers me.
manoj
--
It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever
final. Roger Babson
Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
