Re: Screw non-free.
On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 05:10:03PM +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 09:19:05PM -0800, Erik Steffl wrote:
> > important (crucial?) advantage of debian is that when I apt-get
> > install something the QA of debian is behind it and there's reasonable
> > assurance that it will not screw the system, that the dependencies will
> > be resolved etc. from experience I can see it is working fairly well,
> > even in unstable.
> [...]
> > in other words - it's not a convenience to have third party debs
>
> It's not a convenience to provide our name to software we can't modify (for
> practical or legal reasons) to fix bugs.
Last time I checked, that was actually only true of a small minority of
the packages in non-free. Most non-free packages are there because they
don't allow commercial distribution.
> As an aside, considering the current state of some (most?) of the packages
> in non-free, you won't be buying that much by having it on Debian's servers
> anyway - not recently built, not built for most architectures, etc etc.
> Hardly a credit to Debian, and certainly not significantly better than what
> you're describing with non-free as an external resource.
Non-free does get checked just the same as everything else by the
testing scripts.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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