Braden McDaniel <braden <at> endoframe.com> writes:
>
> On Sun, 2008-10-12 at 10:30 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > So if Oracle was freely redistributable tomorrow an rpm that just put
> > the pre-generated Oracle files in the right place would be ok with you?
>
> Getting to this question from what I said requires so many logical leaps
> that it's not worth entertaining.
For you, all the questions you cannot answer are "not worth entertaining". :-/
> Are you claiming that by creating tarballs that are designed to be used
> without having the autotools installed, the GNU build system is
> impairing free software?
I'll let Nicolas answer that (as he's the one you asked), but generated files
definitely make it harder to exert your freedom to modify the software
(especially if you need the exact same versions of the autotools or you run
into trouble, which is what spawned your guideline and thus this discussion in
the first place) and I don't see what advantages they bring.
> "Ground" level is the upstream source provided by the developer.
But here what upstream includes is _not_ source, it's a generated file!
If you define everything in the upstream tarball as "source", then Oracle's
binaries are "source" too, which is absurd.
> Applying necessary patches to the build scripts in order to build
> binaries does not make anything less free.
Sure, but forbidding us to patch the actual source code on the ground that
it "invites breakage" does.
> If a packager wants to include changes to the build script sources in
> the source RPM, I have absolutely no objection to that. But applying
> those changes as part of the build wins nothing and invites breakage.
Why should we jump through hoops to patch generated files and regularly update
the patches because they'll invariably break if we can just run autoreconf? It
is our (the individual package maintainers') problem to fix things if an
autotools update breaks them anyway!
Kevin Kofler
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