Re: Discussion - non-free software removal
Michael Cardenas wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 01:53:23AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > Anyway, one thing will definitely be the case: if this GR passes, testing
> > won't support non-free, which means updates to software in main that
> > break non-free software won't be held back, which will probably make
> > life difficult occassionally. It might also make contrib a lot harder to
> > manage if it's kept, since dependencies on non-free components (which
> > is what contrib is for after all) will never be satisfiable as far as
> > testing's concerned, and those packages will never be promoted to testing.
>
> This changes the discussion radically. People have been saying that
> users who want to use non free software on debian can, they just have
> to download it somewhere. Since testing will no longer be testing
> non-free software, we won't know about a change to one of our core
> components until a user tries a testing (or a stable) version of
> debian with their piece of non-free software and tells us that its
> broken.
This sounds no different from the case of someone installing software
(free or non-free, .deb or built-from-source) that Debian doesn't happen
to carry in its archives now. Sure, if you install software from some
non-Debian source, obviously we don't support it and aren't bound to not
break it in an upgrade. That's obvious, and true already, right? The
only change is the expansion of the set of non-supported non-free
programs from "all but this small selection" (non-free is pretty small)
to "all".
Craig
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