Re: ndiswrapper
On 9/20/06, Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:
The wine-utils package contains free versions of several common Windows
utilities, built for use with wine.
The nsis package ships a Win32 binary which is a stub used for putting
together self-contained installers for Windows, which can subsequently be
tested under wine (the package even Suggests: wine for this).
One or both of these may be relevant if we're looking to the wine package in
main as precedent.
Hmm...
I don't think that's quite the issue.
Contrasting UAE with WINE, the distinction I see is that WINE has
a more significant set of free software uses.
Both are free software.
Both can be used as emulators to run other free software.
I am under the impression that UAE is in contrib because the free
software case is "vestigial", while WINE is in main because the
free software case is substantial.
There seems to be a significant community of audio software
developers who use systems based on WINE, and some of that
software gets released under free licenses (such as LGPL).
I don't see anything comparable for UAE. Serious development
on the part of people from the Amiga community seems to be
focussed on coding directly to Linux APIs (for example, the
enlightenment window manager).
That said, at the moment, this is just my impressions. If I'm going
to have anything significant to say about this, I need to walk through
each of the cases Anthony brought up and find the associated
free software community. I expect that I can, for each of those
packages, but I have not yet done so. [And, as a further aside,
I've spent quite a bit of time trying to find software development
based on ndiswrapper, but near as I can tell that's a dead
community.]
Anyways, for now... "non free software B depends on free software A"
does not seem to be sufficient reason to put A in contrib (the WINE
case, above, is a good example of that). But on the other hand
"free software C depends on free software A" does not seem to be
sufficient reason to put A in main (there seem to be a number of
examples involving UAE that illustrate this case).
The distinction between main and contrib does not seem to depend
on existence tests.
--
Raul
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