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Re: Packages with non-distributable distfiles



On 5/24/2012 13:33, Aleksej Saushev wrote:
Joerg Sonnenberger<joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>  writes:

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 02:35:49AM +0400, Aleksej Saushev wrote:
We have many packages that do have distfile but don't build on some platforms.
This problem is definitly more important than having few packages of software
not as freely available to everyone as software from GNU project.

I think you missed the part where it is simply not legal to distribute
the distfiles. A large part of the cases here are simply useless if you
don't have the file.

No, I didn't miss that part. For some software you can obtain distfiles
by manually registering and downloading from some (not necessarily original)
vendor. Or you could have obtained the distfile seven years ago, and the
package still works for you.


The point is that it doesn't work for everybody.
The purpose of a packaging system is to build packages. The package in question is failing its purpose. You don't get partial credit if some people have the means to build it when the majority don't. You get a big fat "0". it's binary. It's not asking a lot to have a MINIMUM requirement to maintain "membership" in pkgsrc that the package has to be buildable by everyone (on a per-platform basis of course).

And expecting something to perform its intended function is not a "purist" view.


Personally, if I would care about one of the
packages, I would keep a local copy and be done. Let's not talk about
messing up wip without a factual base, e.g. someone mass moving packages
just because they were created at some point and must be preserved.

I would do the same. Given that I have around 250 local packages already,
it doesn't matter whether I have one more or not. But that isn't the most
convenient approach. At least some people do consider it inconvenient.

In any case, this particular problem is definitly negligible, given others.
Solving it doesn't have any positive impact besides the percentage of built
packages in bulk build report.


More than one person contributes to pkgsrc. It's possible to do multiple things at once. We don't have to stop fixing "real problems" in order to fix this "negligible" one. We can do both simultaneously. The presence of fixable-but-still-broken packages has no bearing on the presence of functioning-but-practically-impossible-to-build packages.

And for the record, I don't really think they should move to WIP, but rather just be deleted outright. They are always available via CVS. Not that WIP would suffer if you pushed them there, that thing seems to unregulated in every way. More garbage would just be a drop in the bucket.

John






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