Re: Please stop the discrimination of non-free packages
On Thu, 22 Nov 2001, Tille, Andreas wrote:
> > package non-free that says "you may not port this package [to <foo>]"
> > (I know of at least one example one which use to several years ago,
> > but it became GPLed later), so even ignoring for a moment the
> > perfectly valid reasoning of "we don't want to", there's solid legal
> > reasons why non-free not only shouldn't but _can't_ be auto-built.
> What about positive/negative lists for those packages which
> enable/disable autobuilding?
Sounds good. Do you volunteer?
The problem is that non-free is just a heap of packages, each with
(probably) their own license, mostly completely different from
other licenses. Remember that licenses are usually written in hairy
legalese. I for one don't even want to look at the licenses of the 313
packages in non-free on i386[1].
The current situation is that packages in non-free will not be recompiled
by default. If you maintain a package in non-free, and you're sure that it
may be compiled on another architecture, I for one am willing to recompile
it for m68k (nothing else, since that's the only arch I have a machine
of, besides i386). Maybe porters for other architectures might be so kind
to do this too. But don't blatantly assume they will, just because there
are autobuilders.
[1]At least, that's what ``grep "^Package" Packages | wc -l'' tells me.
--
wouter dot verhelst at advalvas dot be
"Human knowledge belongs to the world"
-- From the movie "Antitrust"
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