Evan Prodromou wrote: > In closing: I think it's a mistake to leave out Free Software just > because there's not Free Data for that software to work with.
While I agree that it is not necessarily required that a Free package Depend on some piece of Free data for it to operate on, I do believe that if there is _no_ Free data for the package to run with, and that data is required in order to operate, then the package must go in contrib until at least one free piece of data is available. The reason it is OK for a Free image viewer to be in main is not that it Depends on a Free image; instead, it is because Free images are known to exist, and it would be pointless to depend on any particular image or group of images. In the case of many Free emulators, no Free programs to emulate are known to exist, packaged or not. As soon that assumption is proven wrong, the software can go to main. For example, Wine is in main, even though no Windows software is packaged in Debian; this is OK, for two reasons. First, Free Software Windows programs do exist, and it would be pointless to depend on a particular Free Windows program. Second, WineLib allows linking the user's own Windows code to WineLib for the purposes of compiling and running that program under GNU/Linux. - Josh Triplett
