Bug#353277: Please reject to rule on the ndiswrapper question
On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Steve Langasek wrote:
> The Section: field of a Debian package's control file is a technical detail
> of the package, as is the location of a package on the Debian mirror. You
> may consider that a particular decision has political motivations, but this
> may be true of many technical decisions; the technical outcomes are still
> under the purview of the Technical Committee.
(OBdisclaimer: I could care less wether ndiswrapper is in main, contrib, or
/dev/null)
Steve, it is rare that I disagree with you, but frankly, that makes no sense
at all. Either that, or I misunderstood what you meant.
You have here a political/social fact "A" which causes a technical
device/method/procedure "B" to exist/happen.
The ctte can override how B is done, but only insofar as to implement *the
same* "A".
Otherwise, the ctte could overrule just about everything in Debian. Were
they not bound by the SC themselves, they could overrule even the SC itself
by determining that the files that determine in which suite a package go
should make all packages in the non-free suite go into the main suite.
> Having been asked to override the maintainer's decision to list this package
> as belonging to Section: misc instead of Section: contrib/misc, I believe
> the committee has a responsibility to consider the issue.
They can consider it, obviously. They cannot overrule ftp-masters on this
matter, however. OTOH, ftp-masters may decide to listen to whatever the
ctte recommends, but they don't *have* to.
> > The question at hand is whether the statement "this package is not
> > useful without non-free software, even though it will run without
> > non-free software" is relevant wrt the requirement which is in Policy
> > that no package in main must require any package outside of main to be
> > built or executed. This is not a technical issue; it is simply a matter
> > of interpretation of the social contract--which is clearly not a
> > technical issue.
Agreed.
But ndiswrappers being in main or contrib is a sad reason for a GR.
> The question we have been asked to consider is, "which section should the
> ndiswrapper package list in its control file?" This is a technical
The answer to that question is: the one policy determines it to. The ctte
can not say much more than that, packages are not placed into a *suite*
(main or contrib) because of any sort of technical concern.
Placement inside the suit (whether in main/foo or main/bar) might be
different, as it is a best-fit question decided only on technical grounds,
but that's outside the scope of this thread.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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