David Claughton <d...@eclecticdave.com> writes:
> On 18/08/10 09:29, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> David Claughton <d...@eclecticdave.com> writes:
>>
>>> On 13/08/10 17:58, Russ Allbery wrote:
>>>> Raphael Hertzog <hert...@debian.org> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> As suggested by Ian on -devel (see attachment), it would be nice to have
>>>>> a way to remove files during unpack of a source package to hide non-free
>>>>> files from our users without stripping them from the original tarball.
>>>>
>>>>> I also prefer this approach over repacking upstream files so let's
>>>>> implement this feature.
>>>>
>>>> I'm pretty sure ftp-master isn't going to allow source packages with
>>>> non-free content in the main archive regardless of whether that content is
>>>> hidden on unpack (I certainly wouldn't if I were them), so implementing
>>>> this is kind of pointless for Debian.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Another use-case might be to remove "convenience copies" of system
>>> libraries. Might be useful (e.g. for security reasons) to be able to
>>> guarantee that this code isn't being accidentally used by a build (in a
>>> way that can be easily checked by a script).
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> David.
>>
>> And I ask again: How does that differ from deleting them in
>> debian/rules?
>
> Sure you could do that. What that doesn't give you (which I think is
> useful) is a way to easily script a check that this code is not being used.
>
> For example, around the time I adopted graphviz, there was a MBF against
> 40+ packages asking people to check that these packages were not using
> the embedded copy of libltdl (#559812 was the graphviz one FWIW). It
> would have been significantly more efficient if there were a way to
> check this automatically.
>
>>
>> Legally that should be the same. And practically you would have the
>> useless files on the initial source unpack but they would be gone when
>> debian/rules is invoked the first time. dpkg-source -x could run the
>> clean target by default to make the files disapear directly.
>
> Well it wasn't my intention to address the original use case of non-free
> files. But to an extent the same argument applies - if FTP Masters were
> to allow this (and as Russ says, it's a big IF) - I would imagine they
> would want a way to ensure that you really were deleting the files, and
> I don't expect they would want to check debian/rules in every upload for
> appropriate 'rm' commands.
>
> Cheers,
>
> David.
No. The files must be legal to be included. They are distributed in the
tarball after all. So deleting or not deleting makes absolutely no
difference to ftp-master. This only works for things we don't WANT to
use, not for things we CAN'T use. Convenience copies are a perfect
example for this. The deleting is there to make sure we don't
accidentally use them. Not to make the tarball legal. Only repackaging
will make a tarball with truely non-free stuff usable.
MfG
Goswin
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