On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 11:26:56AM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Steve Langasek writes ("Re: Bug#353277: ndiswrapper in main"):
> > 1+5. As noted in my follow-up comments to Ian's proposal, I think the
> > rationale is great, but I draw the opposite conclusion from it. :)
> I'm afraid you'll have to elaborate on that :-).
Ah, what I had written before was:
> 4. The Committee does not wish to overturn or change established
> political policy about the distinction between main and contrib,
> and does not wish to usurp the political authority of the Project
> Leader.
I agree in principle with what you've written here, but I disagree that it
supports your conclusion. The ndiswrapper package is currently in main;
saying that it belongs in contrib *is* an overturning, both of the package
maintainer's judgement and of the judgement of the ftpmaster who approved
it into the archive. I don't see how we can discern here an "established
policy" that says ndiswrapper belongs in contrib when it sits in main
today.
> > I also didn't see that you had called for a vote on this one, just noted
> > that it was "submitted as a votable option", so I was hoping that before
> > voting we could put together a couple of other ballot options representing
> > other points of view that could be voted on as a group, since that's the way
> > that Condorcet works best.
> Right. It seems that we're not going to just make a quick decision
> here. But that means we need your opinion written up in resolution
> form.
Well, AJ seems to have had time for this before I did; so more follow-up on
this to his draft resolution.
> Some questions that may help:
> * Do you agree with Raul and my view about the policy manual text in
> general - ie, paragraphs 3-4, 6(first instance), 7 and 8 of Raul's
> version and paragraph 10 of mine ?
3-4 & 6, yes. (The first 6, which I guess is what you mean by "first
instance"; both of you seem to have double-sixes in your resolutions.)
7, no; and consequently 8 is also no, since it's worded as an
exception to 8. 10 I'm pretty indifferent to.
> * What other things are like ndiswrapper that you think we all accept
> should be in main ? We might be able to suggest possible
> distinctions between ndiswrapper and your examples, or between your
> examples and (say) a package which Depends: on a non-main package.
The packages that seem to be most like ndiswrapper in this regard are wine,
dosemu, ibcs (no longer extant), and mol. All of these packages are (or
were while they existed) in main; all of them are free software written for
the primary purpose of making it possible to run various non-ported,
non-free software on Linux. (Hmm, correction; mol is available in main
because it can be used with mol-drivers-linux, but mol-drivers-macosx is in
contrib. So we're inconsistent after all, hurrah!) While it is possible
*to* use these packages with free software, that's not the common case by
any means, and not the principal reason that they're interesting to users.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature