Re: Porting of non-free packages
Hi,
At Mon, 19 Feb 2001 04:40:31 -0600,
Christian T. Steigies <cts@debian.org> wrote:
> What do you want to have built? Maybe I can give it a shot. Otherwise I
> propose to convince the author of your package to make it free, it will be
> built by the buildds then. After all, non-free is not part of debian AFAIK,
> thats why the buildds prefer to spend their time on main packages.
I see. I understand the limitation of the resource. It is reasonable
that main packages have priority in such a case.
Xearth is the package I want to build now. Though it may be free in
future (with removal of GIF-related functions; the former maintainer
of xearth said that), it is not likely free xearth will be released
before the freeze of Woody.
The advantage against xplanet? Xearth has built-in world map and
a list of major cities in the world (in English [Latin letters],
Japanese [Katakana letters], Korean [Hangul letters], and Russian
[Cyrillic letters]).
However, taking one package would be a cause of flamewar which
packages should be adopted. Thus I don't insist that xearth should
have higher priority than other non-free packages.
I think, without supported by buildd, almost non-free packages don't
have any chance to be included in testing. Please imagine when Woody
will be released and someone wants to download a non-free package
for Woody. If the package is not available for Woody, Sid version
will be the only package which is available. However, Sid version
of package may depend on Sid version of libc and so on.
There are a few solutions.
- Buildd supports non-free also. (with lower priority so that
non-free packages should not affect building of main packages...
any idea of "lower priority"? "after freeze" is a good idea.)
- Non-free packages can be included in testing without having
binaries for all architectures. (Since non-free is not an official
part of Debian, this doesn't mean degrading quality of Debian.)
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
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