Re: [Sks-devel] New Debian Binary Replacement

[Robert J. Hansen]

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On 5/14/2012 9:41 PM, John Clizbe wrote:
> I hereby inquire as to the availability of source code for your 
> release.

Although I'm neither an SKS maintainer nor a Debian SKS administrator, I
have to say the lack of source code confuses me.  There are certain
minimum standards associated with the GPL, and source availability is
one of them.  There are also minimum standards associated with software
essential to security infrastructure, and likewise source availability
is one of them.

So, yes.  Although I've not received a copy of the forked binary, I
would strongly encourage Jens and Sebastian to make a tarball available
post-haste.  I would also encourage them to change the name of their
release: "sks" refers to the package officially maintained by Yaron
Minsky, and referring to their repackaging (and yet-to-be-approved
patches) as "sks" will create needless confusion among the community.

I'm not one of these people who believes forks are evil and must be
avoided.  Forks can foster wild creativity: look at, e.g., gcc => egcs.
But just as egcs had the courtesy to stop calling themselves gcc (until
such time as egcs became officially blessed by the gcc devs as the next
release of gcc), this package needs to have the same courtesy.

I believe that if source is published and the name of the package is
changed, this will address pretty much all the concerns voiced by
people on this list.

So, my requests:

        1.  Source code
        2.  Change of name
        3.  An end to all this useless squabbling

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