Michael Banck wrote:
On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 09:21:50AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:(It is not part of debian, we were told in the past. Opponents of the suggested GR seem to forget that and talk of things like removing from debian, or phasing out from debian.) What's your suggested plan forI don't really care if it is part of debian or not, what we are speaking about here is the debian infrastructure. If we were to move non-free to a virtual non-free host or something, pointing to the real debian infrastructure, this would be fine with me, but seriously, i don't see what would be gained by it.I see only one vital point for having those packages on the "real Debian infrastructure", instead of a mere copy of it: You could continue to reassign bugs from non-free to main. Anything else I missed?
Yes. The web of trust issue.I've used Debian for 9 years now. I've watched it grow, mature, etc. I trust Debian. As an example of my level of trusting Debian, I allow arbitrary Debian Developers run scripts and other programs on my machine with root priviledges. Because that's what installing a .deb requires.
I also know that the thousand or so Debian developers sign their uploads to the Debian servers, so every package in the Debian archives has been uploaded by someone willing to sign their name to it. This helps enforce and confirm my trust in Debian.
I don't have many packages from non-free on my machine -- most of them are documentation, fonts, and Java -- and could probably eliminate half without any noticable loss. But I use a decent amount from contrib -- Eclipse, ant, other Java-based tools, etc -- and I would be loathe to get rid of them.
If non-free went away, I'd lose the web of trust. I'd be forced to get the tools I need from non-trusted sources. That is a major problem I see with getting rid of non-free.
It is not Debian's historical policy to make things harder solely to pursue a political goal. Even the KDE issue wasn't about politics, but legalities. Let's not make things harder to pursue political goals now.
As far as the Java stuff goes, Sun won't free their JDK, but there are other free JDKs out there. The packages I'm interested don't work with them; which is why they are in contrib and I use the non-free Sun SDK. In my opinion, encouraging the free Java SDKs to become better so that Eclipse, et alia, can move to main is a more important goal than dropping support for Eclipse, etc.
Michael