On Jun 23, Giuliano Procida wrote: > 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.
One very important category of contrib software is omitted: packages that depend on free software in non-US. A frontend for GnuPG would fall into this category, for example (dunno if such a beast exists, but I can code one in ten minutes to prove my point :p). So contrib does have value independent of non-free. At one point, we also used it as a quasi-experimental dist for buggy packages; I dunno if policy still permits that practice or not. (Of course, some of us use main for this too! :-) Chris -- ============================================================================= | Chris Lawrence | You have a computer. Do you have Linux? | | <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://www.linux-m68k.org/index.html | | | | | Grad Student, Pol. Sci. | Do you want your bank to snoop? | | University of Mississippi | http://www.defendyourprivacy.com/ | =============================================================================
