On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 08:45:32AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 05:56:12PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote: > > On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 11:34:59AM -0500, Raul Miller wrote: > > > On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 04:21:28PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote: > > > > (and heck, you probably could have setup the APT repository for > > > > non-free during the time you wast^Wspent in this discussion). > > > I think the right place to start would be a statement of intent. > > I guess it's pretty clear what needs to be done in case Andrew's > > proposal passes, no? We've got the nonfree.org domain and we've got ten > > years of experience with hosting Debian packages. > > What's this "we" ? Please speak for yourself,
Fair enough, sorry. > > > The harder part is organizing resources and getting something useful done. > > Hardware/network resources might indeed be a problem. I don't think we > > can assume that any hardware donors had foo.nonfree.org in mind when > > they offered their machines/connectivity. Does anybody have an idea on > > this? > > Sure, keep reusing Debian's resources. One idea was to modify katie just so slightly that she installs non-free packages into /org/foo.org instead of /org/ftp.debian.org. That probably would't go far enough for people in favor of dropping non-free I suppose. > Personally, I'm finding it pretty hard to work out what I'd want to > work on should this GR pass -- can I put up with crappy, contrib-style, > third party non-free stuff well enough that I can avoid having to do > a whole lot of boring make work to reimplement various bits of Debian > infrastructure? I don't think you need to reimplement Debian infrastructure in order to duplicate it, just to adjust it. Of course, you're more expert than me to comment on this. > Would maintaining nonfree.org actually be significantly simpler than > just forking Debian entirely? Probably, but how much? What do you mean by 'forking Debian' anyway? I wouldn't consider outsourcing less than 200 packages (forgot the exact number) a 'fork'. The requirements for infrastructure and maintenance are considerably lower than for a full-blown fork of Debian, IMHO. > There's lots of technical reasons to create entirely new > distributions, so maybe that'd be less unpleasant, in spite of the > extra difficulties. I dunno. > > I certainly don't feel obligated to make any of those choices should > this GR pass. I'm not sure why you'd imagine any particular one of them > will either need to be done should the GR pass, nor why you'd imagine > any of them necessarily will be done. I don't imagine any of those options to actually happen, I'm just trying to figure out a transition plan in case the GR passes. IIRC, the biggest (factual) argument against Andrew's argument was exactly this: 'There's no transition plan. What will our users do?'. But I see that we're running in circles. The 'don't drop non-free' people just say 'd'oh, don't drop it and you don't need a plan', while the 'drop non-free' people don't care about it anyway. Michael
