Re: LCC and blobs

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 12:48:14AM +0000, Benjamin A'Lee wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 11:06:53AM +1100 or thereabouts, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > Yes, of course. So, we could technically distribute ROMs for atari800 if 
> > we found some that met the DFSG, and then we could move atari800 to
> > main. We could technically distribute an ICQ server if we had one that
> > met the DFSG, but we already distribute the client in main. Why?
> 
> Because it's not necessary to install an ICQ server to be able to use
> an ICQ client?  Whereas Perl or an emulator are fairly useless on
> their own.

Right: some emulators are fairly useless without some kind of image (eg. a
BIOS image), just as some drivers are fairly useless without some kind of
image (eg. a firmware blob).  If all of the pieces were packaged, foo-driver
would probably Depend on foo-driver-firmware, and a Playstation emulator
might depend on psx-bios-image, but the icq client wouldn't depend on
icq-server. (Not that policy's Depends: is necessarily equivalent to the
SC's "require" in all cases, but it seems to line up here.)

icq-client does require access to a server to be useful, but there's no
expectation that that server be installable by the machine running the
client; the lack of an icq-server package is not a "piece missing" from
the client.

-- 
Glenn Maynard