Evan Prodromou wrote: > On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 19:02, Josh Triplett wrote: >>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. > > I just don't think that software Depends: on the data it manipulates the > way that it Depends: on, say, libraries or other programs.
>From Debian Policy section 3.5: > Every package must specify the dependency information about other > packages that are required for the first to work correctly. Emulators do not work correctly without software to emulate. > It also seems terribly unhackerly. I mean, heck: if I'd like to create > some Free Gameboy ROMs, I'd want to do it on a Free operating system. Agreed. I would also say that a Gameboy emulator could go into main if all the tools necessary to create a Free Gameboy ROM were packaged, even if such a ROM did not yet exist. In this case, the emulator would serve as a way to test your ROM. This situation would be much like Winelib: No software linked to libwine exists in Debian, but GCC and Winelib together provide all the tools necessary to create some. If it were only possible to create Winelib applications using a non-free compiler or toolchain, then Winelib would need to go to contrib. > Lastly, I guess there's just something really violating about thinking > that Debian is judging the data I have, or could have, on my hard drive. > So I'm not working with Free data. So what? Mind your own beeswax, > Debian. Debian is not judging the data _you_ have. Software in main is usable with both Free and non-free software/data/etc, and Debian doesn't care which you use. Software in contrib has no Free software/data/etc to work with, so it is impossible to use it on a completely Free system; you are still welcome to use it. - Josh Triplett
