Re: source packages and censorship
Daniel Martin at cush <dtm12@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu> wrote:
> I don't quite understand what ability it is that you think would be
> discarded. The ability to distribute everything needed to compile and
> install pine all at once?
Essentially, yes.
> I don't see how this would not be accomplished by a pine-installer
> that asked to optionally download the required files.
> Or are you perhaps imagining the creation of some non-official Debian
> CD that would have the pine-src package on it - it shouldn't be too
> hard to program in a few alternative locations for the pine installer
> to look in before deciding that it should download the programs,
> and it could always ask the user for an alternative location before
> deciding to do the download. (the dangers of attempting to guess the
> source tree by looking at dpkg internals aside)
Yes, there's two kinds of problems here:
(1) if the user is on-line, but doesn't have a fast connection,
it's a good idea to schedule all the downloads at once (overnight,
or whatever), and not to try to do downloads during preinst or postinst.
(2) If the user is not on-line, we've established no standards for
locating sources on cdroms, and the user won't necessarily know
where (which cdrom, path on that cdrom) the source is. Furthermore,
swapping cdroms in the middle of an install isn't always going to
be a good idea.
Imagine if we decided that people using .el (instead of compiled
emacs lisp) had to jump through these kinds of hoops to add
extensions to emacs.
...
Also, the name of the package will not affect whether it's
free or non-free, and thus the user won't be making different
conclusions based on where the package is seen. We can't put
an installer in main if we can't put the program it installs
into main.
--
Raul
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