Re: Porting of non-free packages

[Richard Braakman <dark@debian.org>]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 02:50:15PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> 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.)

I'm afraid it's not as easy as pointing a buildd at non-free.
Some packages in contrib and non-free might have strange requirements
for building, such as libraries that are not publically available.
And there's no automatic way to tell if the package's license allows
porting.  Some might be licensed for only one architecture, or might
require specific approval of each new binary.

So this is going to have to be done by hand.  Perhaps maintainers
could register their packages as ok-to-build, though.

>  - 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.)

I could accept the above, but I also have another proposal.

 - Non-free and contrib packages contain a list of supported
   architectures.  This will be the architectures the maintainer
   or helpers have access to.  The package can move into testing
   when it has been compiled for all of these, and old versions
   on other architectures (if any) are then removed.

This list will be different from the "Architecture:" field, which
lists on what platforms the package can be built at all.

(I don't know what testing does with later builds of a package on
new architectures -- are they moved into testing immediately,
or held for ten days?  Is it possible to get such builds into
the archive even if there's already a newer version in unstable?)

Richard Braakman