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Subject: Questionable copyright and pedigree for MH
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 1997 19:46:48 -0500
From: "Susan G. Kleinmann" <sgk@kleinmann.com>

Package: mh
Version: 6.8.4-10

The copyright file in the Debian mh package reads:
"This is version 6.8.4 for the MH mail system, packaged for the Debian
Linux distribution by David Morris (bweaver@worf.netins.net), from
sources available at ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/mh."

This is incorrect.  The current version of MH in that directory is
6.8.3, dated somewhere around 1993.  The 6.8.4 "version" of 
MH is an unofficial patch update, and the sources for the diffs
which (may have) produced the update are in 
ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/mh/updates/.

Apparently there are additional linux patches in 
ftp://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/mh/patches/linux/
which are meant to be applied after the so-called 6.8.4 patches.

I believe there are several bugs here.  The copyright statement
should say literally where the source files were obtained.  
The debian/rules file should scriptify exactly how to obtain the
Debian package from the specified source files.  

It is not clear at this point whether the linux patches were included,
and if so, whether they were included before or after the unofficial
6.8.4 patches.

In late January, Tony Nugent provided a combined 6.8.4-linux patch
at: ftp://ftp.gw.com/pub/unix/mail/mh/patches/linux/.  (That is,
he patched 6.8.3 with the so-called 6.8.4 diffs, then applied the
linux diffs, and then produced a set of 6.8.4-linux diffs.)  But in 
early February, Tony reported that A.P.Harris noted the need for
_another_ patch which Harris had gleaned from Debian's 6.8.4-2
release of MH!  This is now getting circular.  

The real sources and patches that have gone into the current Debian
release of MH should be clearly documented, and the way in which 
those patches were applied to the original 6.8.3 source tree should
be scriptitied in the debian/rules file.

Susan Kleinmann