Re: Why is "pose" in contrib? (was firmware flamewar)
On Mon, 11 Dec 2000, Vince Mulhollon wrote:
> Quoting Hamish:
>
> > is in contrib. Pose (Palm OS emulator) is in contrib. simh
>
> ...
>
> > So most of these seem to be outside of main, because you need
> > non-free ROMs. x48 does not seem to belong in main since there
> > are no free ROMs for it (actually, no freely available ROMs
> > at all).
>
> The palm pilot has a fairly advanced motorola CPU onboard. Some
> (university?) people have ported the Linux kernel to it... Although I
> can't speak for the porters, I assume they are aiming at embedded projects.
> It's hard to buy any kind of embedded CPU board for $150 that has onboard
> IR, megs and megs of ram, RS-232, a graphical LCD, and can be bought at the
> local computer store. The kernel is freely available, although noone has
> packaged it. For $150 you'd be lucky to get a 16K PIC programmer... This
> ported kernel has been all over slashdot in the past..
>
> Anyway, it seems pose could run that port of the Linux kernel, although I
> haven't tried that. Per /usr/doc/copyright, pose is GPL.
>
> Therefore, the pose emulator running the Linux kernel meets the DFSG,
> therefore pose should be in main.
>
> Or is it in "contrib" because noone has packaged the linux kernel for the
> palm pilot yet?
This would be a good reason: contrib is for stuff that complies with the
DFSG but depends on something outside of Debian to do anything useful,
basically. So as soon as there exists a package in Debian that makes it
useful (or even a meta-package; a simple script to compile a kernel for
it), it could be moved into Debian.
> I think the same logic occurs with the x48. There are no "publically
> available" roms for it, although I have a nice book explaining how to
> program the CPU inside the calculator in assembly... Although I'm not sure
> how good of a debugger x48 would be, it should be possible to legally use
> x48.
If this book or one like it could be distributed in Debian then it could
have the x48 in Debian, or something.
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