Removing non-free - reality check.
Please do not Cc me on this thread. I fully expect 300 MORE messages and
I really do not want them in my inbox.
When this thread started, I immediately saw some problems with removing
non-free from Debian. Technical problems in large, but problems all the
same. Provided those issues can be resolved, why not remove non-free?
Well, there is a 300 message thread that includes a couple more reasons
not to than I had come up with.
Is it possible to remove non-free and still have a functional system?
Yes, it is possible. Is it terribly easy? Not really at the moment,
though a stable Mozilla would go a long way toward fixing that. Mozilla
isn't stable yet, beyond that, here's the issues I'm thinking about in
deciding how I should vote on this GR:
- We're talking about doing this in woody right? Woody is going to take
another 8-10 months to release, get realistic here. There is talk of
putting out another release in 6 months or less, but is that really
practical? I think it isn't since the differences between potato and
woody already promise to be greater than those between slink and potato
were. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes us a year to get woody out
the door. If you think that's not enough time for things like Mozilla
to mature, perhaps the distribution after woody should be targetted
instead.
- Removing non-free will NOT save a reasonable amount of diskspace. If
non-free is 500 megs and you consider 200 mirrors it may add up fast,
but in reality Debian is going to grow 500 megs or more before woody's
release anyway just because Debian adds packages but rarely removes
them. So that's not really a good reason to remove it.
- Dependencies... A lot of people are going to become very pissed off if
they can no longer install packages out of contrib because of their
dependencies. LyX has come up, which depends on XForms. It's possible
to discount LyX because of recent upstream changes which could put it in
main, but the issue remains that without non-free to provide XForms
dependencies, the LyX package in contrib right now is useless. And
several other packages would be as well. We can't do that to our users,
it would be irresponsible as a distribution. This issue must be solved.
- We do NOT want a mess like rpmfind for Debian. We simply don't want it.
Unlike Red Hat though, Debian's policy is published along with tools
such as lintian to help a person test their packages for sanity. There
are tools (not quite complete and user-friendly at the moment) such as
jinstall which would make it easier for people to make software
available in deb format without having to include it in Debian.
- This would doubtless happen with much of the non-free software we have
today if we chose to remove that section from the distribution. Oops, I
mean the archive. A number of other people have made that mistake in
this discussion unintentionally. This IS an issue. Does Debian
distribute non-free software or not?
- If we do this, I feel compelled to move the unofficial list of apt lines
for various non-Debian or not-yet-in-Debian (ie, experimental, cvs snap,
prerelease, whatever) package collections to a place where it can be
found from the Debian website with the notice that these aren't coming
from Debian, use at your own risk, etc. This list basically be an open
listing and shouldn't discriminate based on factors such as non-freeness
in determining whether or not it is included.
That's a lot to think about and I'm still nearly 100 messages behind in
the flamefest. Practical benefit to Debian? Not a whole lot, other than
finally settling the issue that Debian does not distribute non-free
software. Practical problems for Debian? Not a whole lot, other than
having a bunch of unresolved dependencies to resolve somehow in woody.
Still as I said there's a lot more to think about when deciding this
resolution.
I'm not going to get into the holier than thou moral debate. Some people
claim moral high ground for trying to reject free software and others
claim it for not changing the social contract. The rest of you can and
will argue till you're blue in the face and anyone who disagrees with you
on those grounds is therefore necessarily immoral. I'm not interested in
playing that game.
All in all, I support bringing this issue to a vote. Why not? This
flamefe^wdiscussion is going to go on for severak weeks whether a vote
happens or not. Voting on it will at least settle the matter.
FWIW, unzip is no longer non-free upstream, regardless of the Debian
package's state. Please Please PLEASE stop whining that if we remove
non-free, we'll lose unzip. We'd lose XForms, we'd lose Qt1, we'd lose
festival, and we'd lose Netscape. If you want to argue things that'd be
removed, leave unzip out of it.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> GnuPG key 1024D/DCF9DAB3
Debian GNU/Linux (http://www.debian.org/) 20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC
The QuakeForge Project (http://quakeforge.net/) 44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3
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to me
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