Re: mass bug filing for unmet dependencies
On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 10:55:57AM -0400, Michael Poole wrote:
> > We ignore that bios dependency because it's trivial to write the software
> > which serves that role, but in most cases practically impossible to
> > change the hardware to use the resulting software.
> >
> > In other words, it's a hardware issue, not a software issue.
>
> The people at linuxbios.org seem to show that making the hardware use
> a new BIOS is not such a problem; but their status page suggests it is
> sufficiently buggy that Debian would not want to support it. That
> contradicts the assertion that writing the software is trivial.
The software for a particular instance of the hardware is trivial.
Writing software which deals with all the variety of hardware safely is
a problem.
It's really a hardware issue.
> > To revisit your first point, it would conflict with the social contract
> > to treat this as a real dependency because moving everything in main
> > into contrib would be a disservice to the free software community,
> > and to our users.
> >
> > Basically, there wouldn't be a debian system under social contract 1.1
> > if you had things your way.
>
> To reword, you think we should ignore an otherwise valid dependency
> because to consider it would make the Debian system empty. If so,
> fine; I think it is hypocritical, but I can accept that. That kind of
> logic is what I meant by my earlier email about having stricter
> requirements than the license(s) only with good reason.
Put validity on a spectrum, where all claims to validity have some
validity, and where all claims to validity have some counter-points to
indicate that they're not completely valid.
You can't please everyone.
You can, however, ignore trivial issues -- especially where not ignoring
them would result in nonsensical consequences.
--
Raul
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