On Wed, Jun 23, 1999 at 07:28:29AM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > On Tue, Jun 22, 1999 at 03:28:23PM +0100, Giuliano Procida wrote: > > [...] There are items in contrib which do not depend on > > items in Debian's non-free archive, but do instead depend on > > externally available non-free items. Two obvious examples are: > > > > 1. installer/helpers for commercial or other non-free apps; and > > 2. free emulators that require ROM images for normal use. > > > > I strongly object to any move of contrib. I formally oppose any > > voting proposal to that effect (should this mean anything). > > contrib has always been treated as unofficial, same as non-free. > Why should this change now?
Untrue! (Social Contract section 5 is misleading) You may have always treated contrib as "unofficial" but it is often fully supported GPL software. Plenty of other people do not share your view. Put another way, you may lump contrib with non-free, plenty of people lump it with main (they are both DFSG). I believe the fact that the source is DSFG is more important than the existence of any dependency on currently encumbered items. See http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages as well. > With both your examples above, you still can't use the stuff for free. I assume you mean something like "most people can't use the stuff without some other currently non-free item". Even so, they are genuinly useful: Foo Emulator: used for development of a free OS for platform Foo (I do know of some OS devel for the C64). [[aside: should be in main anyway but some people objected. :) Foo Emulator is free to someone who owns a Foo, it should be free for everyone, even if they cannot make full use of it, they can always adapt it to make a free Bar. (Try saying the same thing with s/Foo Emulator/ATM NIC device driver/ - it makes sense).]] Foo Frontend: used with development versions of free alternatives to Foo and will become "main" as soon as a replacement is available (PGP and GnuPG things, for example). Foo Client: used to aid development of a free server for Foo (some are already in "main" despite the heated argument of a few weeks ago about ICQ/CDDB clients). Any attempt to move contrib will stir up another discussion as to what it should contain. I am sure that RMS can be satisfied without us having to introduce politically-correct.debian.org, mirroring is complicated enough as it is. Giuliano.
