Re: Precompiled Emacs binaries, where are the sources?

[Christoph Scholtes]

On 12/11/2011 1:03 PM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:

> Where can I find the sources for the precompiled Emacs binaries in
> <ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/>, e.g. for the 24.0.91
> pretest? The README file points to the parent directory ...
>
> | * IMPORTANT LEGAL REMINDER
> |
> |   If you want to redistribute any of the precompiled distributions
> |   of Emacs, be careful to check the implications of the GPL.  For
> |   instance, if you put the emacs-23.1.91-bin-i386.tar.gz file from
> |   this directory on an Internet site, you must arrange to distribute
> |   the source files of the SAME version (i.e. ../emacs-23.1.91.tar.gz).
>
> ... but looks like all sources have been deleted from there, except for
> the newest one (24.0.92).

The README that the ftp server shows should probably be version 
independent and more generic, but nevertheless this looks like an issue.

Then, if what Ulrich reported is really an issue, and according to the 
Legal Reminder it probably is, what about the weekly Windows snapshots 
we have been providing? They are created directly off of the bzr source 
tree and don't have an associated source tarball. Now, it would not be 
too hard to also create a source tarball for these snapshots and provide 
it with the binary distributions. For all distributions I created that 
have the bzr revno specified it is also possible to recreate the 
appropriate source tarball and upload it.

I would propose this: remove all binary builds except the last 5 and 
provide source tarballs for those. In the future only keep 5 versions of 
the binary distros on the server. This should be enough for people to be 
able to rollback in case there is issues with the weekly builds.

We should also create a README file for the weekly build section and 
show it like the pretest section of the ftp server does.

WDYT?

Christoph