Re: Software in main that is throughly useless without non-free software
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
> James Troup <james@nocrew.org> writes:
>
> > upload his netscape-base (IIRC) to main. The package (like tik) was
> > undoubtedly DFSG free (Adam wrote it), but without netscape it served
> > no useful purpose. I think free software which depends on non-free
> > software to be useful belongs in contrib. I think this is the spirit
> > of the policy manual, but it's certainly not explicitly stated there.
>
> First, you are removing a very important distinction: You have no
> control over what is on the other end of the connection.
Eh? So what?
> Secondly, "useful" is vague.
Yes, it is vague. I was not proposing an amendment to policy, I was
posting a FYI note. As I had hoped Branden extrapolated on the point
far better than I ever could have.
> What is useful?
How about `what the majority of people who want to use the application
would use it for?' That's just a rough idea. As I've said, it was
just a quick note.
> Back to the first point. Perhaps I use lynx exclusively for
> e-commerce, and the only sites I use are running non-free servers.
> Thus, lynx is not useful without non-free software.
*to you*. I had hoped people would agree that tik is not useful
without the server. It seems so obvious to me...
> > Note: the problem here is the *exclusively* non-free nature of
> > required software; if there was a free server to connect to
> > (e.g. with samba, you don't _need_ to connect to a M$ server), I
> > wouldn't have a problem with it being in main.
>
> But that's not correct. The program can start, and it can run, on a
> machine with solely free software. contrib is for things that
> cannot even do that without non-free software.
Well you could make a fake QT which allowed things to start up, but
nothing more. Could we then put programs in main with a fakeqt | qt
dependency?
> You are penalizing a piece of free software because another piece of
> free software, perhaps not even for Unix, doesn't exist yet.
Well *DUH*, that's the case with any free software in contrib which is
linked against a library for which a free equivalent doesn't exist.
> ICQ clients are in the same boat. They have been allowed into main.
It wasn't me that accepted them?
> Please don't reject something simply because it's from AOL.
Please don't troll. I already said on IRC that it's got *nothing* to
do with what the software is or who it comes from. If samba couldn't
connect to anything but a Microsoft server and it was a NEW package, I
would reject it also, and I _rely_ on Samba for my daily job.
--
James
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