[Openstack-devel] noVNC is considered non-free in Debian and Ubuntu

[Joel Martin]

Hello Thomas,

Thanks for contacting me about this issue. If we can figure out some
changes that still fit with my goals for the upstream tree and that would
also make it easier for Debian/Ubuntu to classify noVNC as a free package,
then I'm all for it. However, my time that I am able to work on
noVNC/websockify is very limited lately, so I'm not really interested in
changes that add extra overhead for me in order to comply with policy
trivia (everything necessary to fully use noVNC is already free software).

My primary goals for the upstream noVNC repository are:

- easy for end-users to checkout/download and use immediately
- a useful resource for developers interested in extending and/or
integrating noVNC

Some comments on the specific items:

The include/web-socket-js directory is a pruned copy from the web-socket-js
project. The full source tree is available at
https://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js and I link to it but it's a big
source tree and I'm don't want to clutter the noVNC repo with that (it's
bigger than noVNC itself). If Debian wants to use the upstream
web-socket-js to build the swf file I have no objections of course. But I
definitely don't want building it to be a required build step after cloning
the tree for normal users/devs. If you can convince gimite/web-socket-js to
include the original swfobject.js object in the web-socket-js tree, then I
will include it too but I'm not really that interested in doing extra
munging work when I pull in new versions for web-socket-js (except to
remove the source directory).

The rfbproto-*.pdf files are documentation of the protocol versions that is
a useful reference for noVNC (and generally VNC/RFB) developers. Except for
the most recent version that you can find on RealVNC's site, the older
versions are difficult to find because the original source of VNC/RFB
documentation is no longer online: http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/. As
far as I am aware there are no restrictions on those documents. Doing some
quick google searches it appears that the noVNC repo (and copies of it) is
currently the best way to find these older versions of the document. If
github was still hosting downloadable files then I would be willing to move
these out of the tree and just link to the downloads for them, but github
removed this feature and having them together with noVNC is very useful.

I'm not sure I understand the issue around face.png and logo.js. logo.js is
no longer used and it is only in the tree to help with backward
compatibility for some integrators. I can remove it now if that's actually
an issue. The face.png log came from an icon on an Ubuntu system. If it's
really important I can track down the provenance of that file (although
it's in the test directory which is not part of core noVNC).

I'm definitely willing to accept any changes to the debian/ directory that
would address this problem. For example, is there a simple way of excluding
files/directories when generating the source package? If so, then all the
files listed could be excluded without impacting noVNC functionality,
except that web-socket-js would need to be built as a separate package and
pulled in as a dependency. Another option that might work for the
web-socket-js tree is that I could add a submodule to the upstream
web-socket-js along side the include/web-socket-js directory. This wouldn't
impact most normal users cloning the tree (although it might inflate the
tagged downloads). I'm not sure if that would help you, but let me know if
that would help.

Regards,

Joel Martin (kanaka)



On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Thomas Goirand <zigo at debian.org> wrote:

> Hi there!
>
> We are packaging noVNC in Debian. Version 0.4 is currently in
> Experimental, and an older version is in the next stable (eg: Debian 7,
> aka Wheezy).
>
> Unfortunately, it appears that what you maintain is considered non-free
> for us. Here's the parts which we can't upload in Debian:
>
>
> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=openstack/novnc.git;a=blob_plain;f=debian/README.source;hb=HEAD
>
> It would be great if you could remove the non-free parts of noVNC, so
> that we wouldn't have to deal with differences from your upstream
> repository. That is, using non-obfuscated js scripts, removing the PDF
> for which no source code exist, and the SWF pre-compiled flash object.
> All of these could be created during a build process, which I would be
> happy to help with.
>
> Your thoughts?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Thomas Goirand
>
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