Re: Abuse Package

[Craig Sanders <cas@muffin.pronet.com>]

On Tue, 23 Apr 1996, Doug Geiger wrote:

> I am thinking about working on the abuse package for debian, and have 
> a few questions.                                                      
>
> 1.) It's a binary-only, a shareware program w/o sources.  As I
> understand, this'll be the first package like this, is that a
> problem? Would it just go into the non-free? Or are binary-only
> packages frowned upon?

Netscape is also a binary only package.  The netscape package (due to
Netscape's No Redistribution policy) works by requiring that you have a
copy of the originial netscape tar.gz file in /tmp.  It untars it, moves
everything to the right place, and sets it up for debian.

Probably the best way to approach this would be to contact the authors
of Abuse and offer your assistance in creating a debian package file for
abuse - help them out with dpkg & the .deb file file format etc.

If they go for it, then they can put their official .deb version in
non-free....and best of all, they might get into the habit of releasing
a new .deb package every time they release a new version :-)

Craig