On Sun, 09 Jan 2005, Brian Nelson wrote: > On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 02:53:52PM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote: > > The whole purpose of contrib (at least in my mind) is to indicate > > to users that they will need something extra from non-free or even > > something we can't distribute to make useful use of the program in > > contrib. > > I believe contrib exists because, as the SC states, "we will never > make the system depend on an item of non-free software."
I should have indicated the above as well. I was grasping for a more pragmatic reason. > > Being in contrib doesn't mean that a work is evil, nor is contrib a > > second cousin to non-free. > > It means it is "not a part of Debian," and won't be distributed on > most Debian CD sets. There's no reason why we can't make contrib more easily distributable by CD vendors. It's just important that people realize that it isn't part of Debian, and that they will need things that may not be free in order for it to work. > There's a good chance Debian won't even be installable on such a > system. Whether or not the driver is in contrib isn't going to affect the installability of such a system, since such a system would not only require the presence of the contrib driver, but the non-free firmware on which it depends. If you can get the latter to the system in order to install it, it should not be difficult to make the installation system accept the former. > > You could conceivably move all of contrib into main by making it > > into a package that did something useful. Of course, a package > > made in the way you describe would not be useful at all. > > Of course it would be useful--it has a driver that "depends" on no > "non-free software". Stupid? Very. But still useful... About as useful as a package called "main" that contained all of main. Sure, you could do that for a driver, but then, you can do that with anything that is now in contrib. Don Armstrong -- America was far better suited to be the World's Movie Star. The world's tequila-addled pro-league bowler. The world's acerbic bi-polar stand-up comedian. Anything but a somber and tedious nation of socially responsible centurions. -- Bruce Sterling, _Distraction_ p122 http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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