Bug#879123: glee: source for configure is missing

[Adrian Bunk]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 08:23:24PM +0200, Markus Koschany wrote:
>...
> In my opinion the configure script of glee is DFSG-compliant and
> suitable for main. The license states:
> 
> # Copyright (C) 2003 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> # This configure script is free software; the Free Software Foundation
> # gives unlimited permission to copy, distribute and modify it.

According to debian/copyright the FSF is not a copyright holder of glee, 
and the licence is likely not what you quote.

Whoever wrote the configure.{ac,in} would actually be relevant here.

> It is correct that configure scripts are usually auto-generated but we
> have never treated the absence of those files as RC issues. In
> consequence this means that all automake packages which cannot use
> dh-autoreconf are unsuitable for main.

You are mixing two related but separate issues.

Problems when using dh-autoreconf are a grey area, but these are being 
sorted out with autoreconf usually being used now (in earlier times 
autoreconf was nearly never done in Debian).

No configure.{ac,in} at all is a pretty clear situation,
and also very rare.

> Thus I believe the resolution of
> this bug report would be of general importance to the Debian project and
> should be discussed on debian-devel at least.

The topic has already been discussed there countless times,
most recently for things like minified JavaScript.

> However I am in favor of closing this bug report as "not-a-bug".

In NEW this bug alone would be sufficient for a direct reject[1]:

Source missing
Your package contains files that need source but do not have it. These 
include PDF and PS files in the documentation, or auto-generated files.

Source package missing source
Source packages are part of the distribution. As such source must be 
present for all files in the source package itself, ...

> Regards,
> 
> Markus

cu
Adrian

[1] https://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html

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