On Fri, 18 Dec 2015, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Please keep responses on the devel@ list. CCed to the Council list for visibility and discussion of how this fits with our "Freedom" foundation. == Premise == Some upstream distribute tarballs that include code and content that has been generated at distribution time. Some (non-exhaustive) examples of this include: * Code produced by gdbus-codegen * Code generated by a YACC implementation such as bison or jison. * Autotools scripts such as libtool * Man-pages that are built from templates such as Docbook. * Minified JavaScript or CSS There are many other examples, but those are readily called to mind. This brings up several important questions: 1) Do we require that the original data used to generate this code is included in the SRPM? 2) Do we require that whatever tools are necessary to generate this code is packaged in Fedora (with all the legal and policy requirements that this implies)? If we do not, do we require that the code used by upstream is free software? 3) Do we require that building in Fedora always requires regeneration of this code from the original data?
A bit of Samba perspective. For good part of last 15 years we've been doing Samba documentation in DocBook XML and translating it to other formats as part of a build process. It is not without issues, as templates evolved over time and some distributions had not been updated to provide relatively recent DocBook XSLT libraries we rely on, so at some point, for example, it wasn't possible to reliably reproduce correct smb.conf.5 build on Ubuntu or OpenSuSE. We also happened to uncover real issues in libxslt or gcc at some point in Fedora. So having reproducible documentation rebuild is not only helpful from following a spiritual part of Free Software movement, it actually has practical reasoning by uncovering bugs in the tools that generate code or documentation too. -- / Alexander Bokovoy -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
