It seems that at present, the way packages are organized (having non-us) is a very US-centric way of doing things. There are practical reasons for this (US-based CD distribution, etc). I think most would agree that if we can find a good solution (and implement it) for these practical issues, it would be better if we had a package/directory structure that was more generic/international. Would it be possible to satisfy these country-specific legal issues using the existing depends/conflicts mechanism in dpkg? For example: could we make a virtual package called not-legal-in-US and make RSA-patent-containing packages depend on it? How about a not-legal-on-US-mirrors virtual package that would help flag packages that should not be exported from the US. It would not be difficult to script up a solution getting valid US-mirror or US-CD-images from this. Another advantage would be that it could easily apply to laws of other countries. It would be much easier to add a not-legal-in-DE virtual package than to create a new non-DE directory on all mirrors. Maybe we should hash out a technical solution to this, then move the discussion to debian-policy. -Mitch -- This .sig space available for lease. Please contact: Mitch Blevins | mitch_blevins@mindspring.com
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