[Pkg-javascript-devel] JavaScript policy?

[Ben Finney]

Emilien Klein <emilien+debian at klein.st> writes:

> The current policy is made using the assumption that minified == compiled.
> For my information: Has this ever clearly and definitively been
> established?

I'm not understanding your question. What assumption are you describing?

Equating “minified” with “compiled” is not, AFAICT, an assumption; it is
describing different aspects of the same process.

> I agree that we shouldn't be redistributing *compiled* software that
> we can't guarantee hasn't been fiddled with.

Would you agree that we should not be shipping non-source forms of works
that we can't guarantee have not been fiddled with?

One of the guarantees to Debian recipients is that they have full
freedom to change the behaviour of the software; that entails having the
corresponding source form of the work.

so, whether you call the process of generating an executable work
“compiling” does not matter. What matters is that a non-source form of
the work is generated and we distribute it; the Social Contract requires
us to ensure that the resulting non-source form corresponds to the
source form of the same work.

> Minified files is a practice in the JavaScript developer community to
> provider smaller files (mainly for performance reasons), but they
> remain JavaScript scripts, only harder for a human to read.

In other words, they are not the source form of the work.

> To help make this situation clearer, can somebody point us to (1) the
> exact part of the DFSG or policy that we're using to base our "exclude
> minified files from orig tarball" policy and (2) where discussions
> have been led with folks outside of our team (e.g. -devel) about the
> undistributable character of minified files in upstream tarballs?

DFSG §2: The work must be accompanied by its source code. A minified
file is not the source form of the work, so we must provide, in the
source package, the source form of the exact same work.

-- 
 \     “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we |
  `\      should be glad to serve others by any invention of ours; and |
_o__)     this we should do freely and generously.” —Benjamin Franklin |
Ben Finney