Re: Git branch layout for packages requiring DFSG-cleaning

Soren Stoutner <[email protected]> Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:34:15 -0700

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Organization	Debian
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Monday, August 24, 2026 8:39:19 AM Mountain Standard Time Russ Allbery 
wrote:
> Otto Kekäläinen <[email protected]> writes:
> > Somewhat of a tangent, but I think it is already pretty well established
> > that hosting a copy of upstream git on salsa.debian.org is acceptable,
> > regardless of what files upstream has in their git HEAD or history. Only
> > the stuff we upload to Debian archives is what we consider
> > "redistribution".
> 
> I agree that this is what people tend to do, but legally this feels like
> utter nonsense, so I'm worried that eventually we will be bitten by that.
> I cannot imagine any reasonable legal interpretation of the term under
> which Debian making the code available via Git from Salsa does not
> constitute redistribution.
> 
> If the problem is only DFSG issues, then the law presumably doesn't care
> if we're breaking our own rules. We can just say that the DFSG is ignored
> for things hosted on Salsa, I guess, and that stance does have a lot of
> practical benefits and probably not a lot of meaningful downsides.
> 
> But if the files really aren't legally redistributable by Debian at all,
> or if Salsa violates some terms of the license, making them available on
> Salsa is just as much redistribution as mirroring upstream's tarball
> distribution point would be.

I agree with Russ’s interpretation.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
[email protected]

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