On Mon, Jul 12, 2004 at 07:10:46PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote: > On Mon, Jul 12, 2004 at 02:05:16AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > OTOH, as you're sure to note, an easy way around this is that a package can > > be completely useless in main as long as what it depends on isn't a > > package. Maybe that *was* your point. > > Not exactly. I'm not a fan of useless software on the whole, so I don't > believe that your work-around is a winner. Good, because I don't actually advocate that view. :) > I prefer to fall back on the last sentence of the first clause of the social > contract: "We will never make the system require the use of a non-free > component.". Providing a piece of software which can only use non-free > content is "requiring the use of a non-free component", IMO. That sounds like a reasonable litmus test to me. > > > That would be a waste of archive resources. > > > > Er, before heading down this road, I think you should attempt an objective > > demonstration that we seem to give a damn about wasting archive resources > > in the first place. > > We don't give a damn? That's a pity. I am not asserting that we don't give a damn; I invited you to demonstrate that we do. Translation: IMO there's a lot of crap in main, contrib, and non-free alike. I only really object to this phenomenon when the crap is used as rheortical ammunition to bolster arguments that presumably wouldn't be strong enough if grounded solely on packages that are well-maintained and in wide usage. Lest people like I'm just flaming, I posit that xtrs (in contrib) might be "crap" by this definition, and I maintain it. I think it is well-maintained[1], but I strongly suspect it has staggeringly few users. Consequently, I don't try to characterize it as some sort of precious jewel that illustrates why we, say, MUST, *MUST*, keep distributing the contrib section. The only occasions I've had to even mention xtrs in the past year, in fact, have been in the context of discussions about the packging of emulators. [1] It hasn't had a Debian bug report in quite some time and the upstream author/maintainer has a big brain and writes solid code. But let's be honest -- the fate of empires does not hang on whether Debian distributes a package of it. -- G. Branden Robinson | What influenced me to atheism was Debian GNU/Linux | reading the Bible cover to cover. branden@debian.org | Twice. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- J. Michael Straczynski
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