I can't help but sense a political reason not to
support flash, just because it's non-free, the
maintainers of debian WANT it to be broken, almost,
and certainly don't look hard for a way to give
their users an easy way to use flash. Just as long
as the result is that the users blame Adobe, and
not debian, it's ok - regardless of how much the
users suffer because of it.
Unfortunately, Adobe is to blame in my opinion. Of course no one is
forcing them to do anything. Read my comments below for more
clarification.
Flashplayer could be support, technically, in the
following way:
The flashplugin-nonfree package would keep track
of the last time it downloaded the flashplayer
from Adobe. If an update (ie for security reasons)
is needed, then a new flashplugin-nonfree with
a newer version is released. This would cause
the package to be updated the usual way. The
new package would contain the date at which
Adobe made the lastest version available. If that
date is later than the last time the flashplayer
was downloaded - it is downloaded again, and
installed. If necessary, ie as sanity check, it
is easy to obtain the real version from libflashplayer.so:
strings libflashplayer.so | grep '[0-9]\.[0-9] r[0-9]'
Shockwave Flash 9.0 r48
To make a long story short: TECHNICALLY there is
no reason to rip flashplugin-nonfree out of stable
and testing-- it is therefore not very nice towards
the users of debian and my anger towards Adobe is
now devided over Adobe AS WELL as debian.
stable is meant to be stable. Debian has no control or input over
the stability of Adobe's product. There is no code review of any
kind. It's not possible to ensure that no new features are being
added to a version, which is a restriction of stable. Blindly
trusting that Adobe hasn't added features or instability is not a
stable thing to do.
Packages in stable need to have security support, which is not
necessarily easy for Debian to provide for Flash Player. Unless Adobe
works closely with Debian, I don't see this as being an easy task. I
feel that this security burden without help from upstream is unfair
and unreasonable. Maybe allowing Debian to distribute binaries
instead of just a downloader/installer package would help, but from
what I understand, they don't allow distribution of the player in that
way. (Though I have re-distribution rights for the Flash Player, so I
don't know why Debian can't...)
If Adobe were to release a .deb for it and follow proper Debian
release guidelines, things might be a bit different, but they don't.
They're not required to do so. But because of this, they can't be
given special treatment by Debian. There are specific rules that all
packages, even Adobe's Flash Player, must abide by.
As others have mentioned, it's available to the users. They just need
to know how to get it. If it's *that* big of a deal for them, they
can always use Ubuntu. I feel that users that aren't willing to do
this minor amount of work are the types that jump to Ubuntu anyway.
Jumping through hoops to get Flash Player is a pain, but I don't feel
that Adobe has allowed Debian to offer this as an easy install.
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