[Fedora-packaging] Binary FreeDOS image

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 07:47:54AM +0100, Lubomir Rintel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm just reviewing a DOSEmu package, where the package author includes a
> tarball of FreeDOS installation (binary images of a couple of basic DOS
> utilities, shell and the kernel). I believe that it's probably illegal
> (provided it's GPL code, I have not checked) to do this unless we
> distribute sources as well.
> 
> Would anyone mind if I told the maintainer just to include the source
> tarball in SRPM for now? Building the whole thing from source, while
> cleanly being possible, would add a huge amount of work at this point.

IMHO, it must be buildable from source in Fedora before it is approved.
If you ship a pre-built binary + source, there is no guarentee that 
the source being shipped actually matches the binary. If the build
from source isn't possible using Fedora toolchain, then users would be 
unable to exercise their freedoms to rebuild the RPM. 

There have been a few places in Fedora where we've had binary blobs in
the past, but we've been striving to eliminate these and ensure everything
is fully buildable from source with no blobs.

Daniel
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