[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#798900: Source files

[Ole Streicher]

Am 13.10.2015 um 22:23 schrieb Walter Landry:
> Ole Streicher <olebole at debian.org> wrote:
>> Walter Landry <wlandry at caltech.edu> writes:
>>> Ole Streicher <olebole at debian.org> wrote:
>>>> What are the general guidelines here? Somewhere in written form? The
>>>> DFSG does not contain a hint here.
>>> The rule of thumb that I have seen applied is that 'source' is the
>>> preferred form of modification for the people making modifications.
>>> If a person really prefers editing 1400 character lines, then that is
>>> the source.  However, you can not just state that you prefer that.
>> I'd prefer just to ignore the line: it is a comment line that is not
>> needed for the functionality, so I see no reason to touch it at all. The
>> only reason to touch it for me would be to delete it.
> Sorry, I had not noticed that it was a comment.  I am confused as to
> why it is there.  Do you know why?  Could you get upstream to delete
> this seemingly useless line?  That would solve your immediate problem
> and clean up the code.

Upstream included the code on my request as an external source. I think
it would be not a good idea to ask them for the removal of the line,
since then their version would deviate from the original source.

I am not a specialist at all for Javascript, and all I try is just to
keep a Python package (with a very responsive upstream!) in a good
shape. Unfortunately, nobody with Javascript experience and also nobody
from the Lintian team (who wrote the heuristics to identify this file as
non-source, and also underlined that they still claim the file to be
non-source) took part in the discussion here so far. It looks a bit
weird for me that they create a Lintian "error" and seem not to have a
(even preliminary and discussable) "source" definition. So, I think that
the lintian tag in question is more a "wild guess" and should be marked
as such.

Best regards

Ole