Re: Software in main that is throughly useless without non-free software
James Troup <james@nocrew.org> writes:
> > 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?
Yes. Recall libungif?
> > 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.
But this isn't linked against a non-free library. It can be run with
entirely free code.
> 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
Well there's an obvious discrepancy then, since MANY other programs in
the same boat are already in main, and have been for some time. That
was the only obvious answer that suggested itself, but if you have a
different one, by all means let us know.
> 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.
--
John Goerzen Linux, Unix consulting & programming jgoerzen@complete.org |
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux (Free powerful OS upgrade) www.debian.org |
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The 8,517,880th prime number is 151,385,909.
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