Re: Revoking non-free less violently
On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 11:57:20AM -0600, Brian McGroarty wrote:
> Instead of severing non-free all at once, why not try and phase it out
> more progressively?
Nobody did this until now. Why should somebody do it now? Those who'd
like to see non-free go probably don't want to 'get their hands dirty'
messing around with non-free software. Those you won't probably don't
care a lot. Anyway, the fact that something has not yet happened in the
Debian project usually is a good indication that nobody cared enough.
> I would propose the next release include a package that periodically
> checks what non-free packages are installed.
vrms exists since 1999.
> The results would be sent to a Debian server for statistics gathering.
popularity-contest exists for a couple of years, too. Of course, you
can't force these packages to be installed by default.
> The user would be prompted to enable the feature of course,
We've already got enough questions answered during installation. What do
you think a question like 'We (the Debian project) cannot make up our
minds whether we should distribute non-free or not. Please help us reach
a decision by installing vrms-popcon-cronjob. Do you accept [y/N]?'
would make us look like?
> With the count of installed packages on hand, a schedule could be
> created. Each month, a number of packages could be assigned a 3 month
> sunset date, starting with the least-popular packages, and estimates
> could be given for dates on the remaining packages.
>
> Seeing a drop dead date for each package would inspire
> people to find and create free drop-in alternatives without so
> severely disrupting use.
>
> Even expiring only 10% of the total number of non-free packages each
> month means a full removal within a normal Debian release cycle with
> plenty of time left for testing.
This goes against the Debian practise to not remove packages as long as
at least the Developers still cares.
> I would also hope that the maintainers for the non-free packages would
> still handle security updates for the stable branch,
They cannot, as only the stable release manager (and the security team)
can install updates to stable. The best they could do is upload to
stable-proposed-updates.
> and would take it upon themselves to turn their packages into meta
> packages that suggest free replacements as they are created or found.
That's something that could have (and might have) happened all the time.
Michael
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