On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 10:55:57AM -0400, Michael Poole wrote: > > We ignore that bios dependency because it's trivial to write the software > > which serves that role, but in most cases practically impossible to > > change the hardware to use the resulting software. > > > > In other words, it's a hardware issue, not a software issue. > > The people at linuxbios.org seem to show that making the hardware use > a new BIOS is not such a problem; but their status page suggests it is > sufficiently buggy that Debian would not want to support it. That > contradicts the assertion that writing the software is trivial.
The software for a particular instance of the hardware is trivial. Writing software which deals with all the variety of hardware safely is a problem. It's really a hardware issue. > > To revisit your first point, it would conflict with the social contract > > to treat this as a real dependency because moving everything in main > > into contrib would be a disservice to the free software community, > > and to our users. > > > > Basically, there wouldn't be a debian system under social contract 1.1 > > if you had things your way. > > To reword, you think we should ignore an otherwise valid dependency > because to consider it would make the Debian system empty. If so, > fine; I think it is hypocritical, but I can accept that. That kind of > logic is what I meant by my earlier email about having stricter > requirements than the license(s) only with good reason. Put validity on a spectrum, where all claims to validity have some validity, and where all claims to validity have some counter-points to indicate that they're not completely valid. You can't please everyone. You can, however, ignore trivial issues -- especially where not ignoring them would result in nonsensical consequences. -- Raul
