Re: Bug#353277: ndiswrapper in main

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

Stephen Gran <sgran@debian.org> writes:

> Well parroted.  Since I can see you don't understand the difference
> between main and contrib, I will point you to it.  Please see 2.2.1 and
> 2.2.2 in policy.  If you diff the first set of bullet points that lay
> out criteria for main and contrib, you'll see that the only differnece
> is that packages in main :
> "must not require a package outside of main for compilation or execution
> (thus, the package must not declare a "Depends", "Recommends", or
> "Build-Depends" relationship on a non-main package)"

This is not a complete list.  It may not require a package outside of
main for compilation or execution.  One consequence of that, is that
it must not Depend on such packages.  But this is not the *only*
consequence, it is merely the one being spelled out.

It is certainly not true that a package in contrib can be moved to
main just be removing the package dependencies.  The further question
is: can it be run without the non-free software?

I still am not sure, having not yet received a complete answer to the
factual questions I raised.  (Adam gave recently a partial answer, but
I'm still not clear on the facts to which he was alluding.)

> Do you see a Depends, Recommends, or Build-Depends on non-free or
> contrib software somewhere in the ndiswrapper source or binary packages?
> I don't.  So why is there an argument for changing it?  Since there is
> no foundation in policy, do the benefits or technical merits (of which
> exactly none have been presented) outweigh ignoring a rather clear
> statement from policy?

The question is not whether there is such a dependency declared; the
question is whether the software is useful without the use of non-free
software.

At first blush, it looks as if the only purpose of the software is to
run NDIS drivers.  So the question is: are all NDIS drivers non-free
software?  (Actually, the question is slightly more complex, so please
see the previous message in which I gave a more full version of that
question.)

Thomas