Re: Bug#353277: ndiswrapper in main

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

Adam McKenna <adam@flounder.net> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 04:45:04PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
>> But I don't know; everyone seems to be dancing around the actual
>> question: are there any free drivers for which ndiswrapper is useful?
>> CIPE has been mentioned, but it has also been said that ndiswrapper
>> was not useful in this particular case.
>
> [🔎] 20060220211605.GM1915@country.grep.be

Thank you for the reference.  For the benefit of those who
might not be able to look it up easily, this is a message by Wouter
Verhelst, who says:

  The fact that there is at least one GPL driver for ndiswrapper means
  that it is possible to use ndiswrapper for useful purposes without
  non-free software. And since cipe is not part of the kernel yet, that
  might be a good idea anyway if the native driver doesn't work with the
  kernel which you're using for some reason while ndiswrapper does.
  Which is not _that_ strange, I've seen it often enough with
  out-of-(vanilla)-kernel modules.

So cipe is available directly as source, right?  In other words, there
is no benefit to ndiswrapper in the case of cipe, since cipe-source
exists. I may well be missing something here.

Nobody doubts that ndiswrapper could in theory be useful with free
software; the question I'm interested in is whether it is in fact
useful *now* for free software.

The reason this interests me is that this seems to be the key
question; it seems to me that if something is *now* not useful for
free-software-only systems, it might be better placed in contrib (and
the installer fixed, and perhaps not placed in contrib until after the
installer is fixed), and only moved to main if/when there is a reason.

Thomas