[Openstack-devel] Websockify has been rejected from upload in Debian

[Thomas Goirand]

Hi Joel,

I did receive your mail, but since I was quite over-busy over the last
week, trying to finalize some working packages for Grizzly before the
summit, I might have forgot to reply to your mail. Sorry for that. It
normally doesn't happen often with me.

On 04/10/2013 11:23 PM, Joel Martin wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> Did you get my feedback from your previous email?
> 
> I would like to get noVNC packaged in Debian for the Grizzly release.
> However, I also want to keep the swf object in the main tree because I
> don't want users that clone the tree to have something that works out of
> the box even on older browsers. So here are a few options that might work:
> 
> - The source and dist packaging process could just be defined to exclude
> the web-socket-js directory. I'm not sure if this is an option that
> would work for Debian.

It will not, because I don't use the dist-package, I use git directly,
and tags.

> - Include a git submodule link to the web-socket-js sources but still
> keep the generated swf in the tree. This would allow Debian to build the
> swf file from scratch and replace the one in the tree.

Well, why don't you just create the .swf file in your build process, and
remote the file completely? That would satisfy everyone. I, too, would
like to have a system which would work with every browsers!!!

> - I can create a git branch specifically for debian and other
> free-strict distributions which would have the non-free objects removed.
> This wouldn't contain the most up to date changes because I would only
> merge over to that branch for version tagged releases.

Please don't do that.

> - I could create a separate repository under my account and give you
> commit access and you could pull merge over changes from the main branch
> to that branch (it's more overhead that a branch in the same repo and I
> don't have time to manage that).

I don't use Github. It's a non-free platform (eg: github doesn't provide
the source code of itself). I have already created a "master-dfsg"
branch in the git.debian.org, but that's really an annoyance which I
would like to avoid if possible (see above...).

> - You could maintain your own downstream repo of noVNC that doesn't
> contain the binary pieces and merge changes into it. 

Well, why don't you try to simply have a realy, open source and free,
software? Don't you have the source code for the .swf file? Where does
it come from?

> For any of the last three I could put a link on the README to the
> location where the free-strict sources can be found.

I would recommend against doing this, unless this is really strictly the
only option you may have. Best would be if you could use something that
can build with mtasc / swftools, which are available in Debian!

Thomas