[Debian-med-packaging] Please provide a download page for Random123 that is not enforcing acceptance of a license

[Andreas Tille]

Hi,

I intend to package Random123 for Debian since it is uses in a project
that is interesting for Debian Med.  (Debian Med is a group inside Debian
with the goal to package free software in life sciences and medicine for
official Debian.)

I noticed that you are doing some means to ensure that people who want
to download Random123 source code from your web site have really read
the license.  I can understand your intention but to my experience this
does not really scare away any "bad guys" and is causing disadvantages
for those who intend to respect the license.

When packaging a project for Debian the license is included in the
binary package.  However, the fact that we are distributing Random123
from the Debian mirror might make your means to make people explicitly
accept the license void since everybody can download the code from
debian.org mirrors.

Moreover there is some automatic tool in Debian which raises a flag for
the maintainer if a new version is released.  Unfortunately this tool
can not answer your CGI script so we will not know about new versions of
Random123 which could lead to the situation that the Debian packaged
version will not be in sync with your releases.  That's why I wonder
whether you might like to consider skipping this confirmation step for
the download to avoid this situation.

Kind regards and thanks for providing Random123 as Free Software

      Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de