Hi, While completely off-topic (at least for -mentors), I still feel the need to respond to this. The DFSG defines what free software is. An important freedom (IMO) is #3, the freedom to modify the program and distribute modifications. However, this freedom is pretty useless (to people who want to use exclusively free software) if the modified source needs a non-free compiler. That is the reason (I suppose) that a non-free Build-depends: will land a package in contrib. It may be free, but not all of the freedoms can be used. I very much value (in GNU's words) "The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs". Therefore none of my sources.lists have contrib in them. I don't want to use a program, just to find that I cannot reasonably modify it when I feel the need to do so. Bye, Bas Wijnen On Sun, Aug 07, 2005 at 01:41:48PM -0400, Joe Smith wrote: > Just to chime in: > IMNSHO: > It really makes little difference if software is packaged in main or > contrib. The way I see it both have software available under a > DFSG-complient licence. > Because sometimes there is software in contrib that actually is usable > without non-free software, although it use may be limited, I *always* > reccomend that contrib be included in any and all source.lists. There > really is no reason not to. If the package depends on software in non-free > it will just fail to install. Otherwise it will install just fine because > it does not depend on a missing package. > > There is no good reason not to think of contrib as an extention of main, > where *some* software may require non-free packages. > > Actually I see no good reason at all for a source.list to fail to have > contrib. -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://129.125.47.90/e-mail.html
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