Bug#851111: gargoyle-free: violates font license

[Paul Wise]

On Fri, 20 Jan 2017 20:20:46 +0100 Sylvain wrote:

> First, I just received a notification of this package being marked for
> removal.  I never received any previous notification about this bug
> while I'm subscribed to all BTS notifications.  Maybe this comes from
> this weird second entry in the BTS about reassignment (meaning no
> maintainers got it?) but this is a very bad surprise.

Yes, that is likely the case, except I thought I forwarded the initial
bug report to the maintainer addresses. Perhaps I forgot to do that for
gargoyle-free. I am very sorry about that, my MUA is annoying at times.

> A mass bug filling, when the freeze is in effect.

This wasn't a mass bug filing. The timing was unfortunate indeed, but
the issue was only discovered during the freeze.

> This will take additional time for both the maintainer and the Debian
> Release team.

As per normal.

> No patch.

The needed changes are trivial.

> Wait, Debian is distributing the source code of Liberation, on the
> same servers as the source and binaries packages.

Yes, in a different source package and directory.

It is likely to be a different version and if it isn't already then in
the future when Liberation is updated, it will be a different version.

In addition, when people mirror by source package, they will be missing
the source code for the font unless they manually mirror deps too.

> Doesn't this comply with the GPL already?

Given the version issue above, I doubt it.

> What threats are we trying to address?

Losing our ability to distribute Liberation fonts at all.

The same for Debian derivatives and other redistributors.

Users not being able to exercise their GPL/DFSG-promised rights
and our reputation suffering as a result.

> Unless they ship the source on the same server as their tarball.
> (like a binary package with [L]GPL'd deps)

I was referring to the source package here.

> This sounds like an automated mail with little effort on the sending
> side while expecting decent effert on the receiving side.

This is incorrect, I spent a lot of effort tracking down which packages
 were probably violating the GPL and confirming that for each one.

OTOH, it should be a very minor amount of work for package maintainers,
just repacking the tarball and adding the dependencies.

> I never heard of the Debian Fonts Task Force

The team maintains a lot of different fonts (232 src pkgs) in Debian.

> for all these reasons this was quite a bad first impression :(

I have to say I wasn't expecting a maintainer response either, almost
all the other bug reports I filed about this issue in other packages
were promptly fixed with no extra communication with maintainers.

> With regard to gargoyle-free in particular: the package is inactive
> upstream so it's probably best to let the package die and reintroduce
> it in Debian when they actually make a new release.

Upstream being inactive isn't a reason to let a package die.

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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