Re: [DRAFT] resolving DFSG violations
On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 08:19:02PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
>
>The road we're continuing down is one of incremental *improvement* of
>Debian's compliance with the current Social Contract. We waived the
>requirement for DFSG-compliant documentation for sarge, and resolved that
>for etch; we waived the requirement for firmware in main to be accompanied
>by source (http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_007) for etch, and have
>subsequently fixed, for lenny, the firmware source issues that we knew about
>when etch was released. In between the once-a-release-cycle mailing list
>rants from developers who aren't willing to do the hard work of ensuring
>users can *use* the release on their systems, there's real progress being
>made.
>
>(We've even managed to see bug #368560 resolved for lenny, a software
>licensing bug that predates any of the rest of this which, to my chagrin,
>was reported as a bug that "little was done about" in spite of efforts by
>multiple Debian developers over the years to discuss this with SGI.)
>
>I don't see the point in delaying releases on the grounds that we haven't
>yet reached the end of that road. I especially don't think it's a good plan
>to treat difficult-to-resolve DFSG bugs as blockers for the release when
>these bugs have only been brought to our attention after we're in freeze for
>the release. Why is "release" a better cut-off for these bugs than
>"freeze", anyway?
>
>OTOH, I do understand the desire to put such (diminishing) exceptions to a
>referendum instead of leaving them implicit, and am happy to vote for a GR
>that makes clear to our users the state of affairs in lenny.
+1
There's also the argument that the sooner we release Lenny with the
improvements that *have* been made, the sooner the people using stable
will be able to move away from whatever non-free stuff they've been
stuck with in Etch.
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
"We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management could
ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs." -- Mike Andrews
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