> I can't help but sense a political reason not to > support flash, just because it's "non-free", the > maintainers of debian WANT it to be broken, almost, > and certainly don't look hard for a way to give > their users an easy way to use flash. Just as long > as the result is that the users blame Adobe, and > not debian, it's ok - regardless of how much the > users suffer because of it.
Unfortunately, Adobe is to blame in my opinion. Of course no one is forcing them to do anything. Read my comments below for more clarification. > Flashplayer could be support, technically, in the > following way: > > The flashplugin-nonfree package would keep track > of the last time it downloaded the flashplayer > from Adobe. If an update (ie for security reasons) > is needed, then a new flashplugin-nonfree with > a newer version is released. This would cause > the package to be updated the usual way. The > new package would contain the date at which > Adobe made the lastest version available. If that > date is later than the last time the flashplayer > was downloaded - it is downloaded again, and > installed. If necessary, ie as sanity check, it > is easy to obtain the real version from libflashplayer.so: > > strings libflashplayer.so | grep '[0-9]\.[0-9] r[0-9]' > Shockwave Flash 9.0 r48 > > To make a long story short: TECHNICALLY there is > no reason to rip flashplugin-nonfree out of stable > and testing-- it is therefore not very nice towards > the users of debian and my anger towards Adobe is > now devided over Adobe AS WELL as debian. "stable" is meant to be stable. Debian has no control or input over the stability of Adobe's product. There is no code review of any kind. It's not possible to ensure that no new features are being added to a version, which is a restriction of "stable". Blindly trusting that Adobe hasn't added features or instability is not a "stable" thing to do. Packages in "stable" need to have security support, which is not necessarily easy for Debian to provide for Flash Player. Unless Adobe works closely with Debian, I don't see this as being an easy task. I feel that this security burden without help from upstream is unfair and unreasonable. Maybe allowing Debian to distribute binaries instead of just a downloader/installer package would help, but from what I understand, they don't allow distribution of the player in that way. (Though I have re-distribution rights for the Flash Player, so I don't know why Debian can't...) If Adobe were to release a .deb for it and follow proper Debian release guidelines, things might be a bit different, but they don't. They're not required to do so. But because of this, they can't be given special treatment by Debian. There are specific rules that all packages, even Adobe's Flash Player, must abide by. As others have mentioned, it's available to the users. They just need to know how to get it. If it's *that* big of a deal for them, they can always use Ubuntu. I feel that users that aren't willing to do this minor amount of work are the types that jump to Ubuntu anyway. Jumping through hoops to get Flash Player is a pain, but I don't feel that Adobe has allowed Debian to offer this as an easy install. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
