Re: Are DFSG free package in non-us part of Debian?
On Sun, Nov 15, 1998 at 04:17:53PM -0500, Mitch Blevins wrote:
>
> Would it be possible to satisfy these country-specific legal issues using
> the existing depends/conflicts mechanism in dpkg?
>
It would be difficult to make all mirrors obey this. Most mirroring
methods deal in terms of whole directories. OTOH apt already refuses to
install packages that depend on unavailable requirements, so I don't see the
problem with having optional (not standard) software recommend or
depend on unavailable (for legal reasons) free software, especially if we
publish (as the example /etc/apt/sources.list already does) where they can
be retrieved from.
Using multiple archives from different countries is a practical solution
to the crypto export problem. We could expand on it. non-US could be
renamed Debian-DE and compliment Debian-JP and Debian-US. Beyond just the
crypto issue this would also address patent issues. Patents are uncommon
outside the US but still possible (e.g. MP3 and IDEA). Debian-AU,
Debian-CZ, ... archives could work around even this patent issue. Few
patents are issued in every country that has a patent system, especially the
smaller countries. Perfectly legal, just requires a bit more coordination
on our part to keep the different national distributions from overlapping.
A broken package from each archive providing each real package and
zero-length files for everything in the archive might do the trick.
A "Debian Archive Kit" might be useful so that we could potentially have
archives in all ~50 countries Debian has developers in. Developers in a
free country could choose any archive in another free country to upload
their potentially restricted package to. TCP traffic routed via a police
state could be encrypted just to prevent any possibility of prosecution of
unsuspecting backbone providers, but this is probably overkill and not
really our problem. If the state police want to shoot their own
messengers...
The BTS could remain unchanged. People can file bug reports
with crypto code to non-crypto packages anyway, there's no automated
way to prevent this- we just need to say "Don't do that."
With the 650MB limit we need to restructure how releases and CDs are made
anyway.
-Drake
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