Wichert Akkerman - Debian project leader <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > [1 <text/plain; us-ascii (quoted-printable)>] > > I already mentioned a while ago that I think that the distinction > between main and contrib & non-free is becoming less clear, both > to users and developers. > > The Debian distribution itself consists only of the main-tree. Contrib > and non-free are there mostly as a (popular) service to our users. But > the distinction isn't as visible as it used to be; advances in searching > in the distribution and tools like apt make it very hard to see when > something is in main and when not. Just using seperate trees in the > archive isn't as effective a method making the distinction anymore as it > used to be.
apt is a wonderful tool, which makes the distinction between free and non-free less obvious to the user. Moving non-free software to non-free.debian.org doesn't solve the problem. apt still grabs the files transparently, as it should do. In fact, binary distributions, with no source code available, would be just as transparent, once /etc/apt/sources.list is modified. If we really want to solve the problem, we should make it obvious that the files being downloaded are not from a designated free tree. Perhaps gnome-apt could display an evil-looking icon for non-free software. -- Kevin Dalley [EMAIL PROTECTED] --IAC27471.930066459/laminaria.seti.org--
