On Wed, Dec 07, 2005 at 03:51:23PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le mardi 06 décembre 2005 à 18:55 +0000, Andrew Suffield a écrit : > > main, definitely. There is a thriving community of developers of free > > gameboy games intended to run on these emulators. Don't ask me why, it > > makes no sense as far as I can see, but they're out there. One example > > is here: > > > > http://sourceforge.net/projects/opengbgames > > > > So you don't need non-free rom images. I presume the difference is > > that one maintainer knew this and the other didn't. > > > > (Please resist the urge to package them just to prove a point, we > > already have enough stuff in the archive with no point at all; their > > mere existence is sufficient) > > Shouldn't packages that require something outside the archive, be it > free or not, be in contrib?
It wouldn't make much sense to have the emulator depend on the games, now would it? It's always been kinda borderline in the case of the old console/gameboy emulators anyway, since a significant use for them is to play games which you copied from cartridges you bought (the adaptor plugs into a serial/parallel port, then you download the rom image from it). The parallel case here is oggenc/ogg123, which are mostly used for copying CDs you bought (and similar). We don't have to ship free audio files in order to justify having ogg123 in main. Or as an even closer example, if I invented a new VM bytecode and implemented the interpreter for it as free software, there's no reason why I should supply a useful program to run on it before it could go in main. Here I'm referring to mdk and mixal, a VM that is not intended for any practical use. ObMd: This is distinct from things which can *only* function with non-free works, like firmware images. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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