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. If software authors want Debian's
QA and integration testing, they can release under a DFSG-free licence.
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.