On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 01:04:10PM +0100, J?r?me Marant wrote:
> I propose that we do not sponsor people for non-free packages.
> People that we want to join us and seeking sponsors for
> non-free package are showing that they do not understand
> our philosophy and dedication to Free Software.
It's only fair to suggest that you may wish to start with the membership
we already have. The last time this particular part of our philosophy was
addressed, there was a significant group of people voicing the opinion
that Debian needed its non-free software. Ahh, but Debian doesn't have
non-free software! (wink, wink..)
As much as I'd love to see an infusion of new blood into the project which
would just as soon be rid of non-free in Debian, it's unreasonable to have
a nontechnical barrier to entry which doesn't apply to existing members.
The additional technical hurdles make sense given that new maintainers do
tend to make mistakes. It's also true that packaging software for Debian
has become significantly more complex with the introduction of things like
source-deps and debconf and there are more places for a newbie to make
those mistakes.
But this isn't a technical hurdle. It's a political one designed to help
maintain the facade that the stuff in non-free is not in fact part of
Debian.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@bluecherry.net> Don't feed the sigs
The purpose of having mailing lists rather than having newsgroups is to
place a barrier to entry which protects the lists and their users from
invasion by the general uneducated hordes.
-- Ian Jackson
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