On Mon, 18 Jul 2016 09:02:08 +1000 Ben Finney <ben+deb...@benfinney.id. au> wrote: > On 17-Jul-2016, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > If you want to argue "upstream convenience" as a reason for the > > second, > > Maybe if that were the only justification offered. That's not the case > though. > > > Reading the discussion on debian-devel, and even reading the > discussion in this bug report, the argument for the source form of the > work rests on *whether* the form of the work allows modification on an > equal basis with upstream. > > Neil Williams puts it well in this same bug report: > > Where one format can be modified by every user and another format > can only be modified by some users, then the format which can be > modified by everyone *must* be the accepted format or the package > fails DFSG. When the second format is actually generated from the > first format and cannot exactly regenerate the first from the > second, it is obvious that the second format is not the source > code in terms of the DFSG as changes to the second would be lost > when the first is updated and the second gets regenerated. > > <URL:https://bugs.debian.org/830978#95>; > > Nothing about “upstream convenience” there. That's exactly the post I was replying to, and it does spend a lot of time talking about ability to get the changes upstream - both from upstream point of view and ability of the person doing the changes to get them there. As for this particular quote, the terminology of "a format that can be modified by every user" is not clear at all to me. In what sense couldn't everyone modify the concatenated form? And if you get too picky about preferred format, then that's a git repo, not a tarball. If I want to make upstreamable changes to some software in Debian, then first I clone the upstream git; that's the form I prefer for doing modifications, and the single-version tarball exports Debian distributes are a distinctly inferior form generated from that. > It's about equal access, > for all recipients of the work, to make and share their own build from > the source form of the work. > > That entails receiving the work in such a form, and with all necessary > build scripts, to make modifications (or choose not to modify) and > build the work themselves to get the same result. That is, in brief, > the source form of the work. > > Without the form of the work that is the *input* to the build tools, > and the build tools and script themselves as free software in Debian, > then the recipient cannot be said to have what they need to exercise > DFSG freedoms. You're not really saying anything meaningful here IMO. The recipients would be able to make modifications to a concatenated form and build the work themselves to get the same result. They would have all the necessary build scripts etc to do the work. So what you're talking about here does not in any way imply they wouldn't have the source. Of course, if you've already declared that what they have isn't source then there's a problem - but unless you _start_ from that assumption, what you write above does not give any criteria which could be used to arrive to that conclusion.
