On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 09:22:33PM +0200, Karsten Merker wrote:
> On Sat, 28 Mar 2015 07:04:29 +0100 Wouter Verhelst <wou...@debian.org> wrote:
>
> [splitting non-free]
> > If we scale this down a bit, I think it should be possible to support
> > the suggested split today, and it would also be a useful split if we did
> > so; but as I don't really know dak all that well, please do correct me
> > if I'm wrong.
> >
> > My suggestion would be to split non-free into the following sub-suites:
> >
> > - non-free/hardware: for "hardware support" packages: non-free firmware
> > packages ("firmware-iwlwifi"), non-free drivers ("nvidia-glx"), etc.
>
> I would definitely like to see a split between device firmware
> and software running on the main CPU, i.e. drivers. We have
> lots of devices for which we have free drivers, but no free
> firmware. I do not consider a free driver loading a non-free
> firmware blob into a device-internal SRAM and using it worse than
> having the same free driver use the bitwise identical firmware
> blob when it is already stored in a device-interal Flash/EPROM,
> and most people appear to consider latter acceptable.
>
> So how about non-free/firmware and non-free/drivers?
There were others who've made that suggestion. I can see why it could be
a good idea. Why not, I suppose.
> > - non-free/gfdl: for GFDL-licensed documentation. I first considered
> > suggesting a non-free/doc repository; but most non-free
> > documentation currently in Debian is GFDL-licensed anyway, and I also
> > think it's probably more useful to have something which is considered
> > free by our friends of the FSF, so that those who want can say
> > "install whatever the FSF would consider free". I don't feel too
> > strong about that, though.
>
> Ack, in particular as there is apparently quite a number of
> people who consider the GFDL with invariant sections free or at
> least acceptable.
Right -- the FSF, at the very least :-)
> > - non-free/codec: for codecs in the widest sense of the word. This
> > wouldn't be just non-free multimedia codecs, but also non-free
> > archivers, such as rar-nonfree; anything that contains an algorithm to
> > encode or decode a particular file format would be allowed into this
> > repository.
>
> I am not sure that this is a sensible category. What makes the
> difference between a non-free (un)packer like rar and a non-free
> word processor that is the only application to read a proprietary
> document format (as a randomly generated example)?
Without going into too much detail, while there are free rar
implementations, they don't support all the features of the rar format,
although they do support most. If you end up with a rar file that uses
one of those non-free-only features, you either need to use the non-free
program, or need to ask the person who gave you the file in the first
place to repack it without that feature.
In other words, I see no difference.
The idea of the "codecs" section would be to help people in the
situation of "someone sent me a file that I can't read with free
software". If some package doesn't fit that situation, but is an
implementation of something that would read a file format, one could
wonder why it's in non-free in the first place.
--
It is easy to love a country that is famous for chocolate and beer
-- Barack Obama, speaking in Brussels, Belgium, 2014-03-26
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