Re: Proposing a debian-contrib net...
Michael Alan Dorman <mdorman@mallet-assembly.org> wrote:
> Of course, a much more interesting way to deal with the bandwidth
> issue might be to try and create a distributed network using
> something like gnutella---where people can keep around copies of
> those things they use, and the load can be shared among numerous
> sites.
Sounds like the contrib section of RedHat. But I see some problems
with this:
- Dependencies may be broken, because the contributing users do not
always use the same libraries as the maintainers of the
distribution.
- The quality standard of the packages isn't proved, so the quality of
many packages may be low.
- There is no standard way to report bugs (the user has at least to
decide whether he wants to report a bug against a debian Package or
a contrib/non-free package)
- As it's not Debian, it doesn't have to follow the policy and there
is no way to enforce policy.
- There is no way to check whether the maintainer/uploader of a
package can be trusted. At the moment only registered Debian
maintainers are able to upload packages, so the packages are safe.
If everybody could upload packages to the contrib section...
Compared with the current situation (except this repeated discussion
here), this is a big step backwards (for the user).
> So Debian finally gets to shed its last vestiges of non-free-ness
> (which I agree with, even if I still have a need for some of that
> non-free software), and people who want the non-free stuff get to
> keep it in circulation. Just add another line to sources.list and
> away you go.
It sounds easy, but there are many drawbacks with this. It's not only
adding this line to sources.list.
Tschoeeee
Roland
--
* roland@spinnaker.de * http://www.spinnaker.de/ *
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