i recently submitted a serious bug against foo2zjs because the package provides a non-free firmware fetching script (called getweb) in main. i believe this to be a serious bug for two reasons:
the first is that packages in main should not have any dependencies on non-free software. however, debian policy is not entirely clear on the issue. section 2.2.1 says "... the packages in main must not require a package outside of main for compilation or execution (thus, the package must not declare a 'Depends', 'Recommends', or 'Build-Depends' relationship on a non-main package)." this makes the policy clear about dependencies on "packages," but it does not address dependencies on other external non-free files. the second reason is that the upstream author recently modified his directory naming scheme, which broke that same firmware fetching stuff (the script now links to the wrong locations). so, not only is the version of foo2zjs in unstable broken, but the version in stable is broken as well because of this. this would never happen if the package did not have external dependencies. the maintainer does not believe this to be an issue [1] because the firmware fetching stuff is a small part of the total package. i suggested that he could split out the firmware fetching stuff into a contrib package instead, but he didn't seem to think that was a good idea. and even so, that still doesn't solve the second problem. the correct solution would be to put the firmwares into a non-free package. at the maintainer's discretion, the bug is currently tagged "wishlist" and "wont-fix." i completely disagree, but i will defer to debian-legal's take on the matter. mike [1] http://bugs.debian.org/449497 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]