Re: ndiswrapper
On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 11:51:57AM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> 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.
> 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.
I thought it was established up-thread that UAE isn't useful (in the
maintainer's opinion) without a specific non-free ROM? If so, that seems to
me to be the real issue for UAE; it would be equivalent to having a copy of
wine that doesn't work without a copy of Microsoft's ntdll, in that you
could not write wholly free software that used this wine without first
reimplementing a *specific* component as free software. In that sense, wine
would have a dependency on a non-free ntdll, just as UAE has a dependency on
a non-free Amiga ROM; neither the hypothetical wine, nor the real UAE, is a
complete stand-alone emulation environment that people can build against.
So AFAICS, this term ("UAE requires a specific non-free ROM to be useful")
dominates, making contrib clearly the correct place for UAE and also
rendering UAE useless as a precedent for software that doesn't have the same
constraint of needing a specific piece of non-free software to be useful.
> 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).
I can find many counterexamples in unstable of libraries that don't have
significant communities of free software available written for them, but are
still in main. Where they are excluded, they are excluded based on the
principle that it's not worth supporting an unused library in a stable
release, not on the principle that they don't belong in main because they
"depend" on software we don't include in main.
> 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.]
This last doesn't surprise me in the least; I don't believe that ndiswrapper
even provides an SDK for developers to use in building new NDIS drivers
directly against ndiswrapper. (oh hmm, lightbulb, maybe *this* is the real
difference?)
> 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).
100% agreed.
> 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).
Written as "free software A does not depend on any non-free software and
free software C depends on A", I'm inclined to believe that this *is*
sufficient reason to not exclude A from main.
Cheers,
--
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/
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