On Wed, Nov 17, 1999 at 12:44:00PM -0800, Joey Hess wrote: > > Debian guarentees that everything in it's main distribution is free, which > makes preprending -free to package names quite pointless. The gimp package > suggests gimp-nonfree, which means that if you use dselect or any other > reasonable tool for selecting gimp, and you have set up your system to > access the nbon-free archives, you will be shown gimp-nonfree when you > select gimp for installation.
Really? peon:~# apt-get install gimp Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: gimp 0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded. Need to get 2884kB of archives. After unpacking 6989kB will be used. Get:1 ftp://ftp.sunsite.utk.edu unstable/main gimp 1.0.4-2.0.1 [2884kB] Fetched 2884kB in 8s (342kB/s) Selecting previously deselected package gimp. (Reading database ... 73286 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking gimp (from .../gimp_1.0.4-2.0.1_i386.deb) ... Setting up gimp (1.0.4-2.0.1) ... peon:~# gimp-nonfree is definitely available (it's reinstalling right now). But I already knew about it. I remember finding out about it being a PITA, though. For those of us who don't spend our free time reading package dependencies, the name "gimp" doesn't suggest there's a "gimp-nonfree" any more than "shellutils" suggests a "shellutils-nonfree". > > Gimp-nonfree is not a complete gimp package, it just contains the gimp > plugin. The gimp has a plugin architecture; the fact that Debian omits one > non-free plugin from their base gimp package is not a good reason to say we > should not call that package "gimp". I see your point here. Perhaps a line like this could be added to apt's (dpkg's?) output, to make these "reasonable" installation methods: Package 'gimp' suggests the following packages, which are not installed: freefont, sharefont, gimp-nonfree, gimp-data-extras (>= 1:1.0.0) Please consider also installing these packages. Rob -- The perfect lover is one who turns into a pizza at 4:00 A.M. -- Charles Pierce
