Re: Disaster!!

["Christian T. Steigies" <cts@debian.org>]

On Sat, Jun 24, 2000 at 01:04:36PM -0500, Chris Lawrence wrote:
> On Jun 18, david ellison wrote:
> > What is going on??
> > 
> > All non-free are to be removed from Woody? This isnt good.. I have noticed
> > alot of good non-free s/w I use. So this is how Debian is taking all of us
> > m68k, PPC, x86 etc. What do you guys think?
> 
> Nothing has been decided yet.  The most likely outcome is a
> restructuring of the archive to more clearly separate Debian proper
> from the add-on software in contrib and non-free.  Anyway, we'll have
> it all figured out soon enough.
First I did not want to reply to this flamebait, but Chris fell first for it
;-)
Right, nothing has been decided yet, but does this belong to this list? Why
care about woody, potato is not even released and somehow I do not believe in
woody for m68k. Also, non-free has never been part of debian, it was only
made available as service to the users. Next, non-free software does not
play a very big role for m68k, currently we have 36 packages in non-free,
which have never been compiled for m68k plus 5 more wich are out of date, 3
of these have been unbuildable on m68k for some time. In contrib we have 25
unbuilt or out-of date packages for m68k. Most of these should have an open
bug, since they are not buildable for m68k. If you want those packages for
m68k, get the source and fix the bugs. You can still get the source, even
when they are removed from debian. And probably, somebody will make non-free
packages available, even when they are removed from debian, this even
happens right now (read "KDE", but please don't start another debate on
this. I started building KDE debs for m68k, I did not get very far, since
some very basic packages failed to build.).
What will you be missing when non-free is gone? There is no nescape for
m68k.

I propose you read debian-devel, debian-vote and debian-flamewar if you want
to learn more about this subject. If you want to help and join debian, you
might even vote on this.

Forget non-free, back to work (BTW I would not mind somebody else trying to
build missing non-free debs for m68k. I am sick of reporting bugs on them
and never or only very slowly getting an answer).

Christian