Re: Visualboy Advance question.
Evan Prodromou wrote:
> In closing: I think it's a mistake to leave out Free Software just
> because there's not Free Data for that software to work with.
While I agree that it is not necessarily required that a Free package
Depend on some piece of Free data for it to operate on, I do believe
that if there is _no_ Free data for the package to run with, and that
data is required in order to operate, then the package must go in
contrib until at least one free piece of data is available. The reason
it is OK for a Free image viewer to be in main is not that it Depends on
a Free image; instead, it is because Free images are known to exist, and
it would be pointless to depend on any particular image or group of
images. In the case of many Free emulators, no Free programs to emulate
are known to exist, packaged or not. As soon that assumption is proven
wrong, the software can go to main.
For example, Wine is in main, even though no Windows software is
packaged in Debian; this is OK, for two reasons. First, Free Software
Windows programs do exist, and it would be pointless to depend on a
particular Free Windows program. Second, WineLib allows linking the
user's own Windows code to WineLib for the purposes of compiling and
running that program under GNU/Linux.
- Josh Triplett
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