Re: historical question about fceu in contrib
Evan Prodromou wrote:
<snip>
> 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.
>
> 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.
I'd put it this way. If the package "doesn't work" without particular data,
then DFSG-free data needs to exist.
> Like, we wouldn't let a new word-processor into main without at
> least one Free document in the word processor's format,
Except that in this case, new documents could be created with the word
processor, so it would work without the document.
In contrast, a man page viewer would not be free unless there was at least
one free man page, because without a man page it "wouldn't work".
> and we wouldn't
> let a new programming-language interpreter into main without at least
> one Free script that uses the language.
A trivial script would count, in this case. Without any scripts, the
interpreter "wouldn't work". If, for instance, the language was covered by
an enforced patent and nobody was allowed to make free scripts, then the
interpreter "wouldn't work".
> 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
--
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
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