Re: Software in main that is throughly useless without non-free software
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
> 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?
Libungif allowed you to decompress GIFs; for the majority of software,
this would suffice. A fakeqt along the lines of svgalib-dummy, would
not.
> > > 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 can be run, but without a non-free server, it can't do anything
useful. What about people not connected to the internet, but wanting
to run TiK internally? Woops, they can't. They can with IRC.
Remember what Branden said about a microcosm of DFSG-free only
software.
> > > 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.
Yes, because I didn't accept them. This thread only started because I
happened to look at TiK while processing Incoming. I am *not* picking
on TiK here. As I've already said, and I'll thank you kindly to stop
trolling that I am.
--
James
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