On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 08:20:06AM -0800, Stephen Zander wrote: > I am also concerned about the final status of contrib. John has > repeatedly said, and I believe him, that he's not trying to have > contrib removed. However, contrib packages are also treated as second > class citizens (e.g. promotion to testing etc). Will this continue as > well? I haven't had problems with my contrib package (xtrs) being autobuilt. However, the situation may be more complex for contrib packages that Build-Depend (officially or not) on something non-free versus something that merely has runtime dependencies on non-free stuff, like xtrs and a lot of other hardware emulators. I think that because the stuff in contrib is Free Software, we should do whatever we can to nurture it the same as we do packages in main. Occasionally contrib packages may suffer inconveniences because they are difficult to work with (like Build-Dependencies on non-free). > Lastly, should this GR *not* pass, do its proponents intend to raise > this issue again in six months, twleve months, ever, or will the abide > by the majority decision? Since a frequent argument by opponents of the GR is that "non-free will wither and die of its own accord", and at the same time no objective standards for discerning when that has happened have been generally accepted, I expect advocates of the GR will re-propose it periodically until it either passes, or we know when we can get rid of non-free *without* a General Resolution. Well, actually, we'd probably need a GR to get rid of non-free even if it were empty, given that clause 5 of the Social Contract says "we provide infrastructure (such as our bug-tracking system and mailing lists) for non-free software packages." It has occurred to me that maybe what we should do is amend the Social Contract now as John Goerzen has proposed, but not make any of the technological/infrastructural changes yet. This should be supportable even by most of the people who want us to keep the non-free section for the time being. If we were to do that, we could rename non-free, move it around, and so forth without having to go through the GR process. -- G. Branden Robinson | If you have the slightest bit of Debian GNU/Linux | intellectual integrity you cannot branden@debian.org | support the government. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- anonymous
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