On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 06:15:32PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > On 2003-12-29 21:02:42 +0000 Raul Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >If someone were to implement a decent alternative for that > >infrastructure, > >I would be amenable to leaving that part out of the social contract, > >but I do not like your "drop it on the floor" approach to this issue. > Why does the presence of that alter the success of the proposal?
One effect of removing non-free from Debian is that we can't use all the infrastructure we already have for non-free -- the archive, the BTS, the buildds, and everything else (our n-m process, the PTS, whatever). This means that for the bits of non-free that are still needed, will have to have the infrastructure reimplemented for them, or will have to do without it. Both of those are bad for Debian -- reimplementing infrastructure sucks up time and energy of maintainers on work that doesn't benefit free software; and reducing the available support for our users who need non-free software makes their lives more painful, or encourages them to switch to a different distribution. The question is thus *how* bad are these things. If the reimplementation stuff is trivial, then who cares if we have to waste twenty minutes to get this setup? Probably no one. OTOH, if it takes a couple of weeks' work to setup, and a significant amount of ongoing time, that effectively means a couple of people are now solely working on Debian non-free, well that would be bad. One way of demonstrating that the effort is trivial is to setup all that infrastructure. > Surely, if the proposal passes, those who want the infrastructure will > create it, if it is needed/important enough? Asking those who disagree > with its use to create it seems unfair. People who disagree with the use of a separate non-free repository surely wouldn't be arguing for its creation, though, no? Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we can. http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
pgpL3Wnpto690.pgp
Description: PGP signature
