Re: Bug#353277: ndiswrapper in main (was: Bug#353277: should be in contrib)
On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 10:04:59AM -0800, Adam McKenna wrote:
> Taking it out of main moves us in the wrong direction if our goal is to
> give our users a *usable* operating system, as opposed to some kind of
> 'proof of concept' OS that some people here seem to want to create, but
> that the majority of our users will not want to use.
One point that nobody raised so far: _reliable_ working on ndiswrapper
depends on the 16k-stack patch that is not available in Debian AFAIK.
Without that patch, drivers requiring ndiswrapper (being free or not)
only work by pure chance. So whatever the Depends: line says,
ndiswrapper for any practical purposes depends on software that is not
in main.
So the question is: does a piece of software, that is known not to work
reliably and will never work reliably with the (Linux) kernels shipped
by Debian, have a place in main?
There are efforts from time to time to make the 4K stack the default on
i386 upstream; if/when that happens, ndiswrapper will stop working with
stock Linux kernels. What will be the answer then? Other distributions
like Fedora have already switched to 4K stacks...
Gabor
p.s. I personally still do not care whether ndiswrapper is in main or
in contrib...
Gabor
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MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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