On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 06:06:50AM -0600, Colin Watson wrote: > On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 01:04:10PM +0100, J?r?me Marant wrote: > > I propose that we do not sponsor people for non-free packages. > > People that we want to join us and seeking sponsors for > > non-free package are showing that they do not understand > > our philosophy and dedication to Free Software. > One of my initial packages was non-free (still is, although I hold out > hope for a licence change at some point). I suggest that a better policy > is closer to this: > New maintainers applying as packagers should contribute something to > main as part of their tasks and skills check. This could either be new > packages or adopting existing ones. They may submit work they've done > in contrib or non-free, which may help the AM judge their packaging > abilities, but this work should not be considered sufficient to pass > the check. > I wouldn't have objected to this when I was applying - I had packages in > main too. Perhaps to ensure that the tasks & skills check still means something, there should be some quantifying of just how bad an existing package has to be to qualify -- e.g., a given number of policy violations in the packaging, a standards version below such and such a version. Other than that, I certainly agree. Fixing a piece of unmaintained free software is usually more important to the quality of the distro than introducing another piece of non-free software, or even introducing another piece of /free/ software that will be used by few people. While there's merit in requiring NMs to create packages from scratch because it means understanding the process from start to finish, there's lots of work to be done in Debian -- such as QA -- that doesn't involve creating new packages. Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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