Re: Contrib on official CD

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

On 19 Nov 1997, Jim Pick wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> It's been troubling me that we ship 'contrib' .deb's on the
> official CD that are dependant on 'non-free' .deb's we don't
> ship.
> 
> Obviously, this is stupid.
> 
Your concern, or the practice of distributing contrib? (neither is obvious
to me ;-)

> My proposal:
> 
> The official CD's should not include 'contrib' .deb's - but
> should include 'contrib' source packages.
> 
> The reason: we include 'contrib' source because it could
> potentially be modified to not depend on 'non-free' stuff, or
> routines could be cut-and-pasted into other free software.
> 
> How's that?

While I understand the philosophical dilema you find yourself in, your
solution makes this software less available to our user base, and is, for
this reason alone a poor idea. 

While it may seem a self contradiction to supply a "broken" contrib
without its "fixes", it is the distribution restrictions on the "fixes"
that prevent us from doing so, keeping in mind that non-free IS available
from Debian via ftp, so we do supply the "fixes" in the only way available
to us.

Luck,

Dwarf
-- 
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