Re: source packages and censorship
I think someone already proposed this idea, and it was immediately
ignored, so I'm going to suggest it again:
What about a pine-installer package?
This would be similar to the netscape3 and netscape4 packages of old -
the user would be asked in the preinst to put the pine .orig.tar.gz,
the .diff.gz and the .dsc files into /tmp (or $TMPDIR); if those files
weren't there the preinst would bomb out, aborting installation. (the
documentation displayed in dselect would have to mention this too).
The postinst would then do the unpacking and compiling in an
appropriate subdir. of /usr/src and tell the user (who may have never
used dpkg outside of dselect) how to run "dpkg -i". (or do the
unpacking only, and tell the user how to do the compiling, etc.)
I think people should look at this solution more closely; not only
does it mitigate the concerns of the "my god we can't have source in
binary package form" crowd, but the resulting package could be placed
in _contrib_, instead of being non-free like the pine-src package
would have to be. Then, someone who just got the Debian CD and
entered dselect would find "pine-*" on the list of packages, and
wouldn't have to go out wandering the net to find out how to get pine;
the package would say "go download the source from <site>" in the
preinst when they tried to install it. This would improve the ability
for the naive user to install pine more than a pine-src package that
the user could only find by going to the ftp site. The less the user
needs to search to figure out what to do, the better.
I suggest that a pine-installer package is a superior solution from
both the "make source .debs for non-free packages" point of view and
from the "source .debs over my dead body" point of view.
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