Hi Jason,
On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 12:08 -0700, Jason Fergus wrote:
> This package should recommend snmp-mibs-downloader from non-free, it
> would only work with very limited hardware otherwise.
I think a Suggests is totally reasonable here. Unfortunately anything
stronger would require that the software be moved out of main (Policy
2.2.1, first bullet), and I don't think that's reasonable given that
it's functional for many cases (MIB-II type stuff, for example) and
completely Free Software.
> Personally, I think perhaps cacti-spine itself should be moved to non-free,
> if it is found to actually depend on this package, either that or
> snmp-mibs-downloard should be moved to main?
As mentioned above, I don't think the former is a valid choice. The
situation for latter is a bit more up debate, but it's a very sticky
issue and has resulted in many, many flamewars on the -devel mailing
lists (ndiswrapper, flashplugin, other types of downloaders that are
free but only serve the purpose of fetching non-free stuff).
So, I plan to close the bug with the following actions:
* Add this mib downloader as a Suggests relationship
* Add a note in README.Debian about using the downloader (if you have
any examples or something you think would be useful to note, please
share)
sean
[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: 6.0
> APT prefers stable
> APT policy: (500, 'stable')
> Architecture: i386 (i686)
>
> Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686-bigmem (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
> Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1) (ignored: LC_ALL set
> to en_US)
> Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
>
>
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