First, let me make it clear that I am firmly in the camp that believes minified JS cannot be distributed in main unless the tools to recreate it are also in main. It bothers me that there appears to be a not-insignificant number of people with upload rights who do not believe this.
This message is not about that, though. * Bas Wijnen <wij...@debian.org> [150830 07:53]: > On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 10:14:13AM +0200, Vincent Bernat wrote: > > Is that the preferred form of modification? It depends, but from the > > jQuery author point of view, it isn't: > > Then it isn't. I take exception to this. A number of discussions about "preferred form for modification" have taken place over the years, and one of the opinions often set forth is that there is only one "preferred form" for any given source. The fact is that different developers have different preferences. The fact that the original developer of some software used gimp to create a simple icon does not mean that the gimp .xcf file must be considered the preferred form for modification. Both .png and .ico can be modified just as easily; in fact there are many more tools in Debian that can edit those formats than .xcf files. The basic purpose of the phrase "preferred form for modification" is to ensure that the right to modify the software is not hindered by only having an obfuscated version of the source. I would like to say "any form of the source that can easily be modified should be allowed," but I am not sure that I can go quite that far without any qualifications. Also note that the phrase "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" comes from the GPL, not from the DFSG. > > However, this is a readable source code that will accomodate any > > modification that a end user will deem necessary. I intentionally did not look at the file referred to above, and have no idea whether I would consider it to be a "preferred form" or not. I merely wanted to debunk the "original author's preferred form is the only form that can be considered preferred" statement. ...Marvin
