[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#1025739: Is an autogenerated configure shell script non-editable source (Was: Bug#1025739: hmmer2: missing source for configure)

[Helmut Grohne]

Hi Andreas,

On Fri, Dec 09, 2022 at 01:14:40PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> This "prominent" example was heavily discussed and IMHO its not really
> an example for the current case.  If you look at the configure file of
> hmmer2[1] it surely claims that it is autogenerated.  However, its
> perfectly simple and straightforward shell text with sensibly named
> variables so it is editable code.  Calling this piece of shell source
> code "missing source" is IMHO an over-interpretation of the letters of
> DFSG.

Unsurprisingly, I respectfully disagree. A typical change you'd want to
do to configure is replace a bare pkg-config invocation with
PKG_CHECK_MODULES. Doing this to your configure script is quite similar
in experience to patching a binary. Another very common task is updating
macros from old version, because they contain bugfixes. Being macros,
you'd be chasing down every single interpolation.

Your comparison to compressed javascript (in your earlier reply) is also
interesting. A major aspect of minification is removal of spaces.
Looking into the generated configure script, indentation is total
garbage. Then minification tends to mangle variables. While configure
doesn't really have mangled variables, it only has global variables and
since it doesn't use functions, it establishes scope using *_save
variables. The resulting mess of variables isn't any better than that in
compressed javascript.

So yeah, maybe the comparison to binary is not exactly right, but
comparing it to disassembly certainly is. If you were to ship an
assembly file compiled from a C file without the C source, that would
quite certainly count as missing source.

And then, we also have DFSG #3, which primarily talks about the license
allowing derivative works, but if the "source" renders derivative works
infeasible, then having a license to do so is kinda useless.

Helmut