RE: moving contrib & non-free (was: Re: KDE)
//My current favourite is moving contrib and nonfree to nonfree.debian.org
//(or nondfsg.debian.org), and asking our mirrors to mirror that as
///debian-non-free (or /debian-nondfsg). That way will continue to make
//everything available to our users, while having a ftp.debian.org with
//only our official distribution (ie main).
I almost always download debian from a mirror, and if your proposal goes
through, I would see:
\pub\mirror\Debian\dists\stable\main
\pub\mirror\Debian\dists\stable\debian-non-free
\pub\mirror\Debian\dists\stable\debian-non-dfsg
right ?
How is this different than:
\pub\mirror\Debian\dists\stable\main
\pub\mirror\Debian\dists\stable\non-free
\pub\mirror\Debian\dists\stable\contrib
Or are you proposing I would see
\pub\mirror\Debian\dists\stable\main
\pub\mirror\debian-non-free\stable
\pub\mirror\debian-non-dfsg\stable
?
What bothers me about this last approach is the question of standardizing
the naming and location of \debian-non-free and \debian-non\dfsg in a
mirror's hierarchy.
Plus the fact that if you restructure the hierarchy, *everyone* that uses
internet updates of Debian will have to update dpkg or apt. There are some
mirrors that have still not updated *stable* to *slink*, and if the Debian
hierarchy is re-organized, it could take weeks for it to permutate through
the internet.
Why can't the current structure be left alone ? I think it makes the point
well enough that there is a distinction between the categories of software.
And it does this in a very nicely organized hierarchy. Re-organizing would
be a degradation of the impressive technical merrit that Debian has, IMHO.
-----Original Message-----
From: Wichert Akkerman [mailto:wichert@cs.leidenuniv.nl]
Sent: Thursday, March 11, 1999 8:56 AM
To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
Subject: moving contrib & non-free (was: Re: KDE)
Previously Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> Is it problematic to use virtual domains and a symlink tree to hide
non-free
> under some hostname, for Free Software advocats?
Yes, FTP can only do IP-based virtual hosting. The reason I haven't
come up with a nice proposal yet is that it's a complex solution. Here
are some issues:
Given that:
1) we want to make the distinction between main (the Debian
distribution) and the rest (contrib & non-free) more clear. The best
way seems to be to move contrib and non-free to another (virtual)
host
2) moving things to another host means that all mirrors will suddenly
stop mirroring contrib and non-free unless they manually add that
2 is a bit troublesome. Somewhere I wouldn't really mind if that
happens: we still have contrib and non-free and anyone can get them, but
we can't handle the load for that. We would need mirrors.
Now a mirror can mirror both main and the rest, and even put symlinks
back in debian/dists so users can use a single tree. But then we would
end up with mirror in debian.org which don't have the split anymore..
We also can't ask our mirrors to do virtual hosting, since not every
mirror has a second IP available.
My current favourite is moving contrib and nonfree to nonfree.debian.org
(or nondfsg.debian.org), and asking our mirrors to mirror that as
/debian-non-free (or /debian-nondfsg). That way will continue to make
everything available to our users, while having a ftp.debian.org with
only our official distribution (ie main).
Wichert.
--
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