Le Wed, Aug 06, 2008 at 07:37:47PM -0700, Russ Allbery a écrit : > > I think it would be very surprising to have installation of a package from > the main distribution area result in downloading non-free software from > elsewhere, which is a common case for contrib packages.
Le Thu, Aug 07, 2008 at 01:07:11PM +1000, Ben Finney a écrit : > > The works in 'contrib' are free software. That's not enough for them > to be in 'main', because 'main' is defined as more than just an > arbitrary collection of free software. 'main' is the Debian operating > system, which must, when installed, be useable as a whole without > requiring non-free software on the system. Hi again, I think that if we were shipping a package whose description says "Install this and you will have your 3D working" and which would automatically download non-free software, we would indeed cheat our users. On the other hand, if a package is described as "Free software to download the proprietary driver foo and install it on your computer so that the Debian operating system can make use of it", there would be no surprise to our users. Said differently, the difference is what the function of the package is: if it is to provide the function of a downloaded non-free program, then it would not be compatible with what Ben summarised (which by the way I could not find written clearly in our fundation documents). If the function of the package is to provide a loader, then the loader can work with free software only and the Debian operating system is definitely useable as a whole with it. Some packages already follow this logic: metacafe-dl and others need to interact with some websites whose source code is not available. Despite this, they are in main. The reason why I spend time in this thread is that I thought before that it was not possible to make a contrib package from a source package in main, but actually would be interested in this possibility. I maintain `emboss', that provides 189 command-line utilities, one of which being a wrapper to a non-free program, packaged in `clustalw'. I think that it would be more elegant if I could move it into a 'emboss-contrib' package that would recommend clustalw. But I am definitely not interested in maintaining two branches of emboss in two different categories of our archive. Have a nice day. -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
