Re: Policy on Binary Firmware Fetching in Main (e.g. foo2zjs)
johnhalton@gmail.com wrote:
>Paragraph 2.2.2 probably resolves any ambiguity here:
No, it's about a different situation.
>"Examples of packages which would be included in contrib are [...]
>free packages which require contrib, non-free packages or *packages
>which are not in our archive at all* for compilation or execution."
foo2zjs can obviously be compiled without that firmware file and it
will have the same identical features no matter if it is downloaded or
not, so it does not depend on it: the hardware device does.
>That suggests to me that foo2zjs (or at least that part of it which
>downloads the firmware) should be in contrib. In that respect it
>sounds a bit like flashplugin-nonfree or msttcorefonts, both of which
>download non-free material following installation.
No, it's a very different case since here we have a large free
self-contained free software program which works without any non-free
dependencies, whose package also contains an additional little script
which downloads and copies to an external device some file.
There is clearly no dependency here.
>I don't know what other people's take on this will be - I'm sure most
>people on this list know the ins and outs of the Debian policy better
>than me - but it sounds to me like this package should be in contrib
>rather than main, at least in its current form.
It's commonly accepted that a package can still be in main if only some
part of it depends on non-main software, and in this case there is not
even such a dependency.
--
ciao,
Marco
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