[Pkg-javascript-devel] JavaScript policy?

[Ben Finney]

François-Régis <frv at miradou.com> writes:

> As initiator of the thread, I may recall that the question we ask is
> "Should we remove from source tarball minified versions of source
> files existing in tarball".

An outcome of the thread is to show that the original question is
ill-posed, because it hides some important assumptions. Those
assumptions are now evident, and important questions come from them:

* How do we know – and demonstrate to anyone who asks – the truth of the
  assertion that the source is actually the corresponding source of the
  exact non-source file?

  My answer to this is: Currently, we don't know that at all. We take
  upstream's word for it, though upstream frequently has no incentive to
  guarantee that to us and can easily make mistakes in ensuring it.

* How do we maximise the certainty that what we ship in the source
  package has no files without corresponding source?

  My answer to this is: 100% certainty can be achieved by automatically
  omitting the non-source files from the Debian source package.

* How do we maximise the certainty that what we ship in *every future
  version* of the source package has no files without corresponding
  source?

  My answer to this is: Again, 100% certainty can be achieved by
  automatically omitting the non-source files every time from every
  Debian release of the source package.

* The Debian Social Contract obliges us to provide corresponding source
  for every file in Debian. Should we rate the promise so unimportant
  that we risk shipping a file without corresponding source?

  My answer to this is: No, we should do what we can to meet that
  obligation, and guarantee it to our recipients in a manner that they
  can independently verify.

Whatever your answers to these questions are, I hope you can understand
that they are necessary to provide context to the question you would
like answered.

-- 
 \           “Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in |
  `\                                      these.” —Ovid (43 BCE–18 CE) |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney