Re: apt-get install wordperfect?
Mark Mealman <mmealman@concentric.net> writes:
> Is it too much to ask commercial companies to create .debs?
No, but they don't seem to be doing so.
> Right now we're seeing tarballs coming out for a lot of the software on
> the market, but will it be that way 2 years from now?
>
> I'd be willing to bet we'll start seeing Linux-oriented software
> companies shipping rpms.
We've already started to see a lot of companies (Oracle, IBM) start
shipping Linux versions of products as RPMs.
> And if Debian made room for commercial software in its archives, I don't
> think it'd be too much to ask the companies to run alien on the rpms.
> It'd be a Bad Thing(IMHO) to divert Debian developers away from making
> .debs and distribution debugging GPL projects to handle commercial
> software.
Well, first off, Debian developers time is not necessarily a fixed
resource. I don't see any real argument that if a maintain wants to
devote some time to packaging commercial software, that somehow
*hurts* free software.
Secondly, I don't think the measure of quality created by running
alien on RPMs is as good as I'd like to see. I haven't seen too much
about the guts of alien but I would guess that the dependancies and
maintainer scripts aren't going to be well-tuned....
> My origional thought was that even if companies create .deb files
> there's no way for the .deb's to make it into the Debian archives
> proper. It's my understanding that currently each Debian package is
> uploaded only by package maintainer. But what about debians created by
> authors that are not maintainers?
They can latch on to a Debian developer and work in tandem with that
developer. Or they can undergo the Debian new maintainer process.
There's nothing in the social contract that says that maintainer can't
work on commercial software.
> If Microsoft ported Office and IE to Linux and made .debs available to
> the public, should the .debs be in the archives(assuming they'd allow
> that)? It'd be nice.
Why not (under non-free, of course). Remember that non-free and
contrib are not officially Debian...
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
Reply to: