[ On Friday, May 21, 1999 at 13:26:23 (-0400), Todd Vierling wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: bsd.pkg.mk proposal 2: file control 
>
> This deals with the fact that the GPL requires a 3-year availability of
> source on all binary distributions (Hello Manuel[?]!  This is part of why we
> can't Just Clean "distfiles").

It doesn't mean up-to-three year old releases have to live in the
'distfiles' directory, or even anywhere on the FTP server -- just that
the sources have to be made available on demand.  There are enough
different CDs floating around that these old GNU source releases will be
available in almost every serious collector's library for dozens of
years to come and I'm sure someone in the NetBSD crowd will be able to
cough up a copy of any specified source release no matter how old it
is.  Keeping everything online simplifies or even eliminates the labour
required when someone makes a demand, but it's not required.

Mind you I don't think the 'distfiles' directory should be cleaned out
until at least one major OS release has come and gone (and hopefully
that's quite a bit less than a three year cycle! ;-).  It's bad enough
that even with pkgsrc "dated" as recently as 1.3.3 there are a large
number of packages that are not available at their originally published
locations.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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