Hi,
I would like to get an authoritative answer regarding the removal of a copyrighted file from upstream's source tarball.
The package in question is vxl [1] and the file in question is the Lenna image [2,3]. We currently remove it from the tarball manually and then upload the cleansed archive to the side cache. However, that effectively breaks scratch builds, since the source is not available.
I would like to remove the offending file in %prep, thereby excluding it from the RPMs. However the original archive as present in SRPM and side cache would then contain a non-free copyrighted file. Is that allowed?
Either way, since I couldn't find a clear answer in the packaging guidelines, I would also like to get approval for a text that could be published in the guidelines, so we have a place to point people to should this come up during review.
[1] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/vxl [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1965175 [3] https://lintian.debian.org/tags/license-problem-non-free-img-lenna
Thanks for your advice,