non-distributable source ball + workaround

[Jérôme Benoit]

It appears that in its current form the source ball is non-distributable from a Debian perspective because it does not contains the script machinery that was use to transform the involved GAP source files (for details, see question in the debian-legal list and the first answer). The scripts distributed in the source ball are dummy scripts and there exists no target in the distributed Makefile files to perform the transformation. As a matter of fact, the source ball is itself a result of the transformation (see the dist-hook target in src/Makefile). As Debian contributor who Intend To Package libGAP (ITP/libgap-sage) I am stuck by this legal issue. To overcome this legal issue, a redesigned source ball must be provided, either at the upstream level or at the Debian maintenance level. The former may ask heavy work from the upstream maintainer, the latter only involves the Debian maintainer (myself). I am willing to provide a Debain Source (DS) based on the GIT material. Somehow, here I am stuck again because the libGAP repository contains no tag: the download tools provided by Debian to create a Debian Source from a upstream GIT repository uses tags as references. Within this perspective, is it possible to set a tag at each packaging commit (at least the last one) ?