Hello John, thanks for your analysis. I see 3 issues from your report.
1. The source packages contains undistributable man pages.
Yes, unfortunately archlinux mixes Linux man pages and POSIX man
pages in one package, hence these pages went in the upstream set.
To remedy this specific problem, I'll prune those pages from the
upstream set, make a new upstream bug fix release and a new Debian
release. This should fix the problem in Unstable.
For Trixie, I can provide an according backport, as I do regularly.
However, it needs to be discussed what the best fix would be there.
My personal preference would be to make an according upload to
"stable-proposed-updates" or whatever.
2. There are missing licensing information
So far, our skripts for the Debian package only analyse the files
actually shipped in the binary package, where you can find a complete
list in debian/copyright.
Having done dozens of L10N NMUs I noticed that these lists are
often not well maintained, especially when looking for translations
(they are often forgotten). So I don't think this is a serious bug
(probably important).
To address these, I would include an upstream infrastructure to
list the licences of all upstream man pages. But since licensecheck
does not detect all of them, this cannot happen overnight.
3. These undistributable pages "slipped through"
As upstream, another script would then (in the future) check if
there are new man pages introduced and their license would be
inspected and only shipped upstream if they allow distribution.
This way, *in the future* no such page could "slip in".
And one question:
[Are] they really a meaningful part of the source for this package?
Yes. To rebuild the translations in a reproducible way you need to
transform the original man pages (from the dates they were pulled form
the various distributions) into template files, which are then synched
with the po files from the translators and transformed into translated
man pages. You can find more about the general worflow in po4a(1).
If I missed something, please let me know.
Greetings
Helge
--
Dr. Helge Kreutzmann [email protected]
Dipl.-Phys. http://www.helgefjell.de/debian.php
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