On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 02:39:24AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> You were confident that non-free will diminish to zero, and yet the
> number of packages is montonically increasing, and as log as any
> non-free package competes favorably with a free one on "merits" (which
> presumably cannot include freeness itself), we will continue to support
> them.
>
On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 07:21:54AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
total main contrib non-free %main %contrib %non-free
bo 1188 980 31 115 82.5 2.6 9.7
hamm 1852 1524 101 227 82.3 5.5 12.3
slink 2664 2269 97 298 85.2 3.6 11.2
potato 4305 3889 123 293 90.3 2.9 6.8
woody 8766 8291 203 272 94.6 2.3 3.1
---------------------------------------------------------------
sarge 10283 9734 257 292 94.7 2.5 2.8
sid 11168 10555 306 307 94.5 2.7 2.7
Taken at face value, it looks as if the number of non-free packages
has not increased *significantly* since slink.
Also, taking your suggestion that one should consider source packages
instead of binary packages, I suspect that package-splitting has become
a lot more common than it was in the days of slink, so a more detailed
analysis might actually show that the number of non-free packages has
decreased over the long run.
I tried using a simple algorithm to count the number of source packages,
but the true picture looks like it's sufficiently complex that some
hand-work is needed. For example, the non-free package doc-html-w3
is a compatiblity pseudo-package. It depends on two other packages
that provide W3C recommendations for each of 2 time periods, where the split
was made just to reduce download time. To my way of thinking, these are
actually 1 package.
It looks as if the packages that will be most difficult to replace with
nearly-equivalent DFSG alternatives (other than games) are going to be
in the areas of fonts, math, and graphics. There are roughly 30 non-free
packages in these categories.
Susan
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