On Sat, 25 Sep 1999, Craig Sanders wrote: > On Fri, Sep 24, 1999 at 05:59:07PM -0400, Jaldhar H. Vyas wrote: > > The criterion should be utility. > > wrong. we've had this censorship discussion many times before. the only > criteria for inclusion in debian is: >
Yes I know. I remember it happening at least twice in relation to this package and I remember the purity package debate too. What I was trying to address was this notion that keeps coming up that if you disallow one of this type of package you must disallow them all. It doesn't follow. Some packages are "worth" more than others. Worth is often hard to define but not impossible. Debian may not want to get into the definition business but that doesn't mean it can't be done and circumstances may force it too. > - is it free? > - could someone be bothered doing the work of packaging it? > > if the answer to both questions is yes, then there is no justification for > refusing the package. > Yes but the maintainer should also ask - Does it enhance Debian? Not because he has to but because he should want to. And other developers and users should feel free to comment. The reason is that we are not just shoveling packages on a CD but at least trying to put together a finished product. Sure we decide to make the packages we are interested in but we also enjoy making a thing that other people enjoy and use. That's why we are making a public distribution rather than just working alone in our basements. I could GPL the contents of my /tmp directory and debianize and upload it right now. But I won't. Not because someone is forcing me not to but because it's no good for Debian to have such a pointless package clogging up it's diskspace and bandwidth. I'm also looking at the packages I already maintain and I'm going to orphan or maintain privately the ones which I don't think add anything to the dist. Even if it isn't official Debian policy, IMO (and I stress this is my opinion) more people should think this way. > > The Bible as a literary and cultural foundation of Western > > civilization will be useful to a lot more people than the Anarchism > > package. > > 'utility' is a subjective thing. i personally would find the anarchist > faq far more useful and interesting than (a bad translation of) > religious texts. I understand. But would the entire Debian constituency? (Which is what? Just the developers? Developers + users? All Linux users...) If we are interested we could find out. This has been a bit of a rant. Let me try and add something constructive. It looks like we are going to 3 CDs. In the future we will only get bigger. How do we manage that growth while not irritating users (swapping CDs sucks) or censoring maintainers? One approach which has been suggested is to make extra cds by section. So a data CD could include the bible, anarchy FAQ etc. Perhaps at some point there will be a ham radio cd, electronics cd etc. This has the advantage of being infinitely extensible but I worry that it narrows the scope of Debian for the general user as most CD vendors especially the cheap ones will probably not bother with the extra CDs. I would rather see the "core" Debian containing a sampling of all the various types of free software available and the far-out esoteric stuff would be addons. That way people would at least be exposed to different things even if they weren't able to get really in-depth with just the basic Debian CDs. The big fly in the ointment is how to decide what gets into the core because as you point out, it is very subjective. I think the popularity-contest is a good way to help with this. -- Jaldhar H. Vyas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
