[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#689951: Package appears to be non-free

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Emmanuel,

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 08:47:33AM +0200, Emmanuel Promayon wrote:
> >I personally would be happy if you would decide for the later because
> >in addition you get a lot of other information and how people might
> >deal together with other problems.
> After my answer yesterday I subscribed to the CamiTK package only,
> but reading your answer, I just reconsidered and subscribed to
> debian-med mailing-list as it seems the best option to improve my
> learning curve.

Fine.  So in future mails I will spare the "To:" to your address - you
should receive the messages via Bug tracking system and mailing list.
:-)
 
> >In this case would CamITK remain in *main*!  Considering the fact that
> >you know all these facts - would you volunteer to do the needed steps?
> I am on a tight schedule this week. Do you think it could be ok if:
> - I remove the licence offending part of the CamiTK source for the
> moment (the tetgen plugin) today

If you can remove it upstream this would probably the bes solution.
Please note the following:  The Debian Release team does not accept new
upstream versions for Wheezy in general.  So if the change should be
successfull for propagation to Wheezy please make prfectly sure that
this change is the only one compared to the tarball currently in
testing.  So you culd do something like

   camitk-3.0.2.1.tar.gz

and mention in the upstream changelog something like

  - Just removed parts of code which are not DFSG free (no other
    code changes

In the debian/changelog we could refer to the fact mentioned in your
upstream changelog to convince the release team that we do not attempt
to sneak in new upstream code.  Otherwise we would need to "backport"
the changes to the version inside Debian.
(In case my advise was not clear enough feel free to ask for further
 clarification.)

> - I do a better work at the beginning of next week where I could
> reintroduce the tetgen plugin but using the tetgen debian package
> instead and correct the two other bugs properly (#689021 and 690830)

May be I was not fully clear.  If we drop the tetgen dependency
completely (and if I understood correctly the plugin in queston needs to
be dropped / deactivated as well) then and only than camitk can remain
in Debian main.  If there is some dependency from any non-free component
(be it tetgen or whatever) the package needs to be moved from main to
contrib which is something I would like to avoid.  So the action to let
camitk remain in main is the following:

  1. Remove tetgen fom the upstream tarball (may be also cut the plugin
     in question as well if it does not make any sense without tetgen).
  2. Build a camitk package targeting at main from this source tarball.

To gain full functionality we could gain (for Wheezy+1) optionally with

  3. Create another source tarball camitk-plugins (or
     camitk-plugins-non-dfsg or whatever name).
  4. Build an according Debian package from this plugins tarball linking
     with Debian packaged tetgen targeting at contrib and recommending
     camitk from main
  5. You can Suggests camitk-plugins in the camitk package (but not
     Recommends, which is only allowed inside main)

> For #690830 there is a patch proposal and there is also a another
> way that I would like to try first (that will probably have better
> compiler specific/multi-arch support).

This could be done if you are pretty sure about this and the change is
obviosely simple and straight to get accepted by the release team.
While it is a really good thing to fix this bug we need to make pretty
sure it will not introduce new problems (which is the sense of the
freeze process).

For the time line:  I think doing step 1.+2. from above until end of
October is fine.  Everything else has time because it does not affect
the current release.  Is this doable for you?

> Thanks again, all your help is really appreciated.

Also thanks to you because without your cooperation we would not have
competence and manpower to maintain camitk inside Debian.

Kind regards

      Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de