Re: New DFSG-compliant emacs packages
David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> Peter S Galbraith <p.galbraith@globetrotter.net> writes:
>
> > David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> >
> >> [...] since nobody can
> >> understand or work with the broken mess the Debian Emacs package
> >> policies provide.
> >>
> >> I think you'll be hard put to find any maintainer or developer of an
> >> Emacs or XEmacs application who would not rather use a self-compiled
> >> Emacs than the Debian contraptions.
> >
> > Ouch, such spite...
>
> That is no spite. Ask on the developer lists.
"broken mess" and "Debian contraptions" sound spiteful to me.
> I subscribed to this list when I had a need of understanding the Emacs
> package policies. While I did not succeed in this endeavor, there are
> still decisions made here where I think my input not completely amiss.
> If you know for certain that Debian developers won't listen to input,
> I might consider unsubscribing again.
I doubt anyone would respond favorably to "broken mess" and
"contraptions". I doubt you would on the AUCTeX list either. But I
would think your input would be well received if it were more
constructive. But this is a Debian policy issue, not an Debian Emacs
packaging policy issue, so there not much you can do about it. Moving
the whole thing to non-free means removing Emacs from Debian, since
non-free isn't part of Debian. I understand that the line is unclear to
many users.
I agree that real bug may concern `report-emacs-bug'. Perhaps we could
substitute a front-end that tries to separate Debian bugs from upstream
bugs to deal with them differently (`M-x debian-bug' could be invoked
for packaging issues). The documentation package could be mentioned
there too. Or send all bugs to Debian and let the DDs decide whether to
send them upstream.
In any case, this is a separate issue from the policy of only including
free software within a package.
Peter
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