Evan Prodromou wrote:
I think that it's a mistake to say that an interpreter or emulator "depends" on the data blobs it interprets, in the Debian sense of "dependence".
That's all well and good, but obviously somebody (presumably somebody important) somewhere disagrees, or it wouldn't have happened in the first place. I myself don't really give a rip either way where the emulators end up, I'm just pretty sure that my explanation summarizes the supposed reasons behind it. What could be helpful is to find the first such emulator that ended up in contrib and see if there was any discussion on the debian lists prior to its inclusion in the archive. Programs don't get dumped in contrib for no reason, and I admit the reasons emulators were in contrib were not obvious to me at first (and I'm still not even sure I have it right). I'm willing to bet there was some discussion on this years ago and we just need to dig it out. I just don't really know where to start looking.