Branden Robinson wrote:
To be clear: I was soliciting information, not hustling for votes. No one seemed to have the full history on the emulator issue, so I was trying to get the background on it. There was some confusion on the matter; see, for example, this post:Evan was fishing for support for his position in a recent thread entitled "Visualboy Advance question."[1]. "Some other debian-legal people" appears to refer to Humberto Massa, in one message.[2]
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/06/msg00472.html
It's probably not a good idea to take every discussion on debian-legal as an argument. My theory at the time was that the old PC emulators' dependence on non-free system OS ROMs (like the atari800 package) had been fossilized into a policy that _all_ emulators depend on non-free software and thus go in contrib.Evan did at one point moderate his thinking a bit[3].
It seems that that's not the case. We actually don't allow packages into main if there's not publicly-available, DFSG-free data for them to work with. Like, we wouldn't let a new word-processor into main without at least one Free document in the word processor's format, and we wouldn't let a new programming-language interpreter into main without at least one Free script that uses the language.
That strikes me as odd, as it reverses the direction of dependency we normally use in Depends:. But discussion here seems to show that that's actually the case, and I accept it even if I find it weird.
~ESP