Re: Flame against non-free burning, time to think.
On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 11:36:23PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > > > 2) it has slowly been trending down. (with a bubble up in sid)
> > > 115 < 227 < 298 < 307
> > 298 > 293 > 272
Isn't it fun ignoring the figures that don't match your prejudices?
> > > Packages that were unreleasable presumably weren't counted in the
> > > distribution release totals. That the number of non-free packages in
> > > unstable is larger than the number of non-free packages in any release
> > > is instructive.
> > For woody, it might mean lots of them weren't built for all releasable
> > archs. Hardly an indicative sign since non-free is not autobuilt.
> Isn't what matters the source package?
I've posted the numbers by source package elsewhere.
> These numbers point up two problems with opposition to the GR:
> 1) What good are non-free packages doing our users if an ever-increasing
> proportion of them are only available in unstable?
That remark doesn't have any supporting evidence.
> 2) The "bubble up in sid" indicates people's growing interest in
> *maintaining* non-free packages, if nothing else.
Uh, it's a 5% increase, compared to a 20% increase in contrib and a 15%
increase in main. This soon after woody's release -- and given it's in
direct contradiction of a multi year trend since early 1999 -- that's
closer to "experimental error" than "underlying trend". Unless you have
some supporting data you'd care to share, of course?
In any event, if more people really are interested in maintaining non-free
packages, that's an argument to keep non-free around rather than have
them waste their time setting up alternative infrastructure. The question
here isn't simply one of mechanism -- "do we drop non-free now, or let
it die?".
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.''
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