Hello, ... First i confess that i did not read all the thousands of messages about this thread, since i have other more serious things to do, and it seems to me that we had this exact same conversation some month ago.
Also i think the schedule of this discution is baddly off, why could you not wait for potato to be released, before starting this huge flamewar, have we not enough work with potato ? or did we not delay it enough like that ? And branden, i thought you were so overworked that you had no time to look at the Xfree 4.0 package, apparently it seems not to be like that, since you have time for futile flamewars, ... :))) So once that is said, you speak about freeness, wanting to remove all non-free pacakge from debian, saying that you don't see why developpers will waste their time on non-free packages and other such stuff. But then what is the problem with it, if you don't want ot package non-free package, just don't do it, but you cannot limit the freedom of other maintainer who want to package non-free software, or can you ? I agree that there is no reason to keep non-free packages that are no more maintained, so we sould remove all orphaned non-free packages. Also i find it ridicoulous to remove source only packages, just to place installer packages into contrib. It will only make it more complicated for user to use it, but not achieve anything else, since user will still be using non-free software, and in a certain way, we will still be using it. Also not all non-free package are doomed to remain non-free forever. In particular, i took over the ocam lpackage, because the previous maintainer did not want to have anything to do with non-free packages anymore. But i needed ocaml fro my work, and didn't want to install a rpm based box to use it. Also i had some mail exchanges with the authors about the freeness of ocaml, and after some time (one and half year or so) they decided to make it free, and it is now in main. I do not say that it was because of me that they did it, but still surely it has contributed at least a little to their decision to have someone from debian speak with them. Also at the same time i maintained other free packages that depended on ocaml, and that depended on the particular setup of the ocaml package that was following debian policy. How do you imagine this would have worked if i had to expect users to selfinstall ocaml, and hoping that all of them would make the necessary changes to make it policy compliant ? Thus is suspect all of you claiming for removing non-free, will also loose one of the force of debian, and that is that all package, be they part of debian (main) or not follow the debian policy and will integrate in a harmonic system, and not the mess that all the heterogenous rpm based stuff is. Ok i have said enough, please read what i have said above, look above the maybe controversial or provocative part ot the mail to its true content, and think about it before making wild assumption, and in the meantime focus again on real work, ... Friendly, Svne LUTHER
