Re: Bug#353277: ndiswrapper in main
On 2/23/06, Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
> Up until this evening I was of the opinion that this was the case; then
> Anthony presented an analogous scenario on IRC that I found persuasive.
> Supposing that lesstif had not been written yet today, and there were no
> free packages in Debian that used this API, would lesstif have to be put in
> contrib? And I think the answer is no; I think writing a new free software
> application to use the motif API would be lame and not worthwhile, but
> that's indeed not a reason to put lesstif in contrib instead of main because
> lesstif doesn't depend on those applications, it merely extends the
> capabilities of the free operating system to include running motif apps.
This has been bothering me, too. But there's several intertwined
issues here.
One issue is the time-sensitive nature of some of the relationships
between packages.
Another issue is the role of the package in the context of the user
community.
Debian dependencies are designed around "the typical user". A package
would go into contrib if the typical user would have to install something
which isn't a part of Debian's "main" to use the package in the sense
which most people would mean if they were to talk about using it.
There are undoubtably border cases, and problem cases, but
I don't think the lesstif example is a problem here.
--
Raul
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