Re: Witness computation - minor breakage in the build system

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> The benefit is that a deoendency on the VCS goes away.
>
> I don't see that should be considered as a benefit.

Well, the whole point of the GPL and the delivered source tar balls is
to give the user the ability to make his own changes.  If the Makefile
dependencies don't work when making changes to the source from a
tarball, it does not look much like a source tarball.

The GPL states regarding "corresponding source":

      The "Corresponding Source" for a work in object code form means all
    the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable
    work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to
    control those activities.

If it is not possible to modify the work reasonably without having a
source code checkout available, then the tarball is not the
corresponding source according to the above definition as it does not
allow for modifying the work.

I'm not overly interested in what the lawyers have to say about this,
but in my opinion it at least concerns the _spirit_ of the GPL if what
we distribute as the source will not lend itself to modification and
recompilation.

-- 
David Kastrup