On 2004-01-08 13:25:56 +0000 Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>
wrote:
I doubt anyone with a package in contrib wants to keep it there, no
matter what their position on non-free is. Having no packages that're
worth maintaining in contrib would be a strong argument that non-free
software isn't necessary anymore, IMO.
Looking at contrib, I see the following major groups:
1. Java programs. It seems that work is happening to make some depend
on free java-like systems, but more help would be welcome.
2. Emulators. They're mostly contrib because their ROMs are non-free.
Difficult to move. There are some which looked moveable, but I've not
checked in detail.
3. Enhancements and front-ends for non-free software. qmail scripts,
for example. I think most already have replacements in main. Are there
ones which aren't redundant? Could they be ported to software in main?
4. Free software data files for non-free software. Do these really
depend on non-free? I guess they may be pretty uninteresting without
it.
5. Installers for non-free software. I can't see how these can ever
vanish unless their maintainer accepts that an alternative exists in
main and it dies that way.
6. Free software with non-free essential data. More general case of 2
which probably needs upstream convincing or the data replacing with
some under a free software licence.
7. Free software using a non-free essential library. Probably a more
general case of 1, which needs it porting to use a different library,
or that library part made optional and disabled in the debian build. I
was surprised there were so few of these that aren't java.
I actually stepped through a 30% section of the contrib list and then
did a sample of the remainder, so I may have missed a class or more.
Can you spot it?
I think there are 254 packages in contrib (grep -c '^Package: '
Packages). If we want to reduce the size of contrib, I suggest
classifying these and doing something similar to my previously posted
plan for reducing the size of non-free. Is anyone interested in doing
this?
--
MJR/slef My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
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