On Sun, Jun 04, 2006 at 12:56:05PM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > On Tue, 30 May 2006, Bas Wijnen wrote: > > Packages containing some contrib material, without which the package > > functions well, can indeed go in main AFAIK. > > Yes. That's enough. If you agree on that why do you need after that to > find a complicated explication on why finally this is not OK ? Because the package (as I understood it, I don't actually know the package) doesn't actually function at all for some people. That's not because they aren't interested in it, it's because they need non-free stuff to make it work. > > However, if I understand the situation correctly, this package is > > completely useless without the non-free firmware if you happen to have a > > device which needs it. The fact that the package is useful for other > > people is quite irrelevant: the download script is useless for them > > anyway, irrespective of their attitude towards non-free software. > > No it's not irrelevant. You need to consider the package as a whole, it's > not a package in one situation and another in a second situation. > > The split is not justified by any technical need and thus your reasoning > is purely ideological. Of course it is! There is never a technical reason to put anything in contrib or non-free. That's all ideological. You make it sound like ideological arguments are not "real", and are less important than technical ones. I strongly disagree with that. Debian is an organisation which provides software which is both technically and ideologically very good. Both of these properties should be protected. Putting things in main which really belong in contrib "because there's no technical argument for putting them in contrib" is damaging the image of Debian IMO. It makes people think we only care about technical matters. If that was the case, contrib wouldn't exist at all. > Technical reasons say the split is rather useless: > creating a new source package from scratch for a 10 line script is waste > of our resources. I wasn't suggesting a new source package. I assumed (and this has been confirmed in this thread) that it is possible to create a contrib binary package from a source package in main. > So the decision is entirely up to the maintainer. Of course it is. And if the maintainer comes here to ask what to do, we're going to give advice. > He can integrate it in the main package. However if he decides to create a > dedicated package for the wrapper, then he needs to create a new contrib > source package. IMO any (binary) package containing those lines must be in contrib. Since the rest of the package it currently lives in is usable in main, the split makes sense (because that package doesn't belong in contrib). > > Then again, this sounds pretty much like a thing for debian-legal. :-) > > Not at all. We all know what is DFSG and what is not in this case. It is totally clear that for some people this package depends on (as in: doesn't do anything useful without) non-free things. IMO that makes it contrib, but others don't seem to agree. In case of such (theoretically based) disagreements I think of debian-legal. That thought can be completely misplaced of course. :-) Thanks, Bas Wijnen -- 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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