Re: Backports into stable
On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 09:57:20AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 03, 2004 at 10:19:44PM -0500, David B Harris wrote:
> > http://www.backports.org
> >
> > That's as centralised you're going to get - it's run by Debian
> > Developers and you need to be a Debian Developer to upload to it (in
> > other words, the same rules as the regular Debian archive).
>
> Hmm, sounds like a good example for nonfree.org to follow.
Well, something along these lines was planned for non-free.org from day 1.
I'm not sure whether you're talking about the technical implementation
(AFAIK, backports.org is slightly hackish in this regard) or the social
implementation (i.e. the same rules apply as for the regular Debian
archive).
I've repeatedly stated that for the latter nothing else would make sense
(modulo perhaps a NM-process loosely coupled to the official one).
There are quite a few archive implementations which are suitable for
this from the technical POV. Besides backports.org, there is
mentors.debian.net, ftp.gnuab.org, the one used by the Debian *BSD port
(which is packaged as 'debpool' in main for bonus, AFAIK) and of course
katie herself.
As the box designated for the non-free.org archive had a full katie
install already, we thought it would make a lot of sense to use that
one.
With the turned down GR, non-free.org does not have a box available
currently to my knowledge. I still believe non-free.org would make
(limited) sense for maintainers who would like to maintain non-free
packages, but would rather do so external to Debian (FWIW, I would like
to do the same. There is a lot of 'free for academic use' type software
in my field of endeavour, which I would not want to put on debian.org,
but I'd be happy to put it elsewhere).
If hardware and motivated people for non-free.org eventually shows up, I
believe we should not clone the whole non-free part of the archive
anymore, but rather just start from zero packages and add whatever is
wanted there by the respective maintainers, perhaps importing the bug
history of that package, if that's possible.
Michael
--
Michael Banck
Debian Developer
mbanck@debian.org
http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html
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