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Re: stability of non-free?



On Sat, 26 Oct 1996, joost witteveen wrote:

> How are the views from the other people in the debian team?
> Should packages in non-free be somehow more stable than
> the ones in unstable? And if so, how are the maintainers
> of non-free packages to ensure this?
> 
> Or, is it OK to make non-free packages depend on unstable, and
> maybe we should add a README to non-free, explaining
> that the packages in there are viewed as unstable as "unstable",
> and that the packages in non-free may depend on "unstable"?

This problem is exactly what I was thinking about two days ago. My
question was:

	Shouldn't non-free (and propably contrib) be moved under
	stable and unstable?

I know think that contrib stuff doesn't really belong to "The Debian
System" and it could stay as it is. But the non-free stuff has the same
quality as "free", just the copyright is more restrictive (it also has a
real maintainer, applies to Debian packaging standard, etc.)

So perhaps we should create reorganize our filesystem (ftp):

	stable/free/binary.....
                    source
               non-free/binary.....
		        source.....
	unstable/...

But if we consider non-free stuff _NOT_ as part of the Debian system, we
should propable do the following:

	stable/binary
	       source (as now)
        non-free/stable/binary
		        source
		 unstable/binary
			 source

I would prefer the first case, because of the dependencies. It will be
much easier for the user, if he knows what versions belong to a Debian
release (say buzz), even if the files are in non-free.

The way we handle things know is not satisfying, since one don't know if a
package in non-free was just uploaded (and might contain bugs) or is
considered as _stable_. This is surely a problem for systems that need to
be stable, but using non-free software isn't a problem.


Just my $0.02,

Chris

--          _,,     Christian Schwarz
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