On Thu, Apr 23, 1998 at 01:48:40PM -0700, George Bonser wrote: > > When you know complain about the removed pine package, then you have two > > direct solutions (beside the solution to make your own pine package and put > > it on a derived distribution, as you are describing below): > > Why do you continue to avoid the question? Debian has distributed Pine > in non-free for about two years. As far as I can tell, Pine's license has > not changed. It is Debian's POLICY towards that license that has changed. > THAT is what I want clarified. Pine is not a new package in the > distribution nor is it in a new section of the distribution. Debian has > had its policy for a long time. That is why the package has always been > put in non-free. Are you aware that among other things the patches to pine added since the last binary package was released include things which are not merely configuration but are purely bug fixes, feature enhancements (maildir patch comes to mind) and other things along that line? UoW was asked about these things and they said they didn't want binaries of unapproved patches. That was their decision, not Debian's, not mine, not anyone else here's to make. This got pine pulled out of hamm when it was frozen. What I suggested (and there was at least one person who agrees with me) was to pack the pristine source (which is distributable) along with the Debian patches (configuration, additional features, the debian/ directory, etc--also legal to distribute) and roll it up in to a wrapper .deb file so people can see the thing without digging through the source trees (as I had to---quite annoying that if not for that the fact that I intended to patch for maildir anyway before I found it had been done) and make it easier on people who want the program as a debian package. Granted, we can't distribute a binary package, but we can build it locally and I'm willing to bet you have the stuff you need to do it on your machine right now, with the possible exception of dpkg-dev. I believe the package maintainer has commented on this thread already and seems at least interested in the prospect of a pine-src package which would probably end up in slink and hamm-updates. This may not be the simplest solution, but the UoW doesn't want us to have the simple solution. In this sort of situation, I think a -src .deb file is a good thing for pristine source with which one can apply Debian patches. Does anyone else think so? Currently the only things I know of in this category are qmail and pine. Netscape can be put in .deb now and I don't think you can distribute rvplayer.. > > I think ranting on a public list instead is not very kind. > > Then will someone please answer the question? Shooting the messager does > not fix the problem. All I want is an clear answer to the simply question: > Why did Debian change their interpretation? Because someone asked and the UoW clarified that they didn't want patched binaries if they didn't pre-approve the patches. The maintainer didn't like that idea. > > To be more concrete: If the maintainer of a package decides that it is too > > high risk to put a package in non-free because of the copyright, he is free > > doing so. I did not speak with either the maintainer nor with the upstream > > authors about this issue, so I'll not impose any judgement on either. > > Please answer the question. Pine has had that same license nearly > forever. Debian has had the same policy. Pine was free-enough to go in > non-free as a binary for a long time. Suddenly it is not. Why. Clarification of terms of the pine license and the factor that some of the patches are not just FHS-compliance editing of makefiles and the like. > But Debian has also maintained a non-free portion for stuff that does not > meet the condifitions of the dfsg. Are you saying that Debian is going to > drop non-free and contrib? I am baffled. "The danger of having to remove > it"? Huh? You seem confused. main is guaranteed to be 100% free. > Non-free is guaranteed to be 100% non-free. I accepted that when I browse > in the non-free archive. That's why I want to see a pine-src package built. It would at least put it back in where people could use it.
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