Re: weekly policy summary
"Davide G. M. Salvetti" <salve@debian.org> writes:
> ***** MS => Manoj Srivastava
>
> Hi Manoj,
>...
> As you see, this whole issue stems from this one question: «What do
> you want Debian to be?».
>
> MS> What if it is true? What if the non-free software does indeed
> MS> provide functionality missing in Debian? We bury our heads in the
> MS> sand and pretend that it does not exist? We do our users a disservice
> MS> and make it harder for them to discover and istall the missing
> MS> functionality?
>
> What's the problem about installing non-free software on a Debian
> system, by hand, or by means of a deb package if it exists?
It was proposed to remove the suggests that go to non-free. And thats
what several people are against and several are for. If the suggests
to non-free or contrib are depreciated by policy or even forbidden,
debian will loose much.
Look at it this way (a big bit overstreached): "Whats the point of
having non-free if it might not be spoken of openly?". Non-free is a
part of Debian in some way, so outruling it is not a good idea in my
POV.
> Nobody here wants to forbid users to do this, and there are many of us
> who are indeed happy to help. We even encourage software companies to
> build their own deb packages, if they want to: does this means we
> should allow those packages to be referenced from Debian (i.e., main)
> ones?
Definilty yes. Its no harm done by refering to non-free. For people
who don't like being told that there is some non-free package he
doesn't have on his CD, there should be an option in
dselect/apt. Removing the references is evil, not showing them if they
are unwanted is the right thing to do.
>...
> Beside, users will easily know about non-free software from Freshmeat,
> advertising, and the like, if they want to, so there's no point
> arguing that if we don't teach them about it they'll never know of its
> existence (this would indeed be a very Debian-centric point of view,
> that I don't think refers to reality by the slightest bit).
Yeah, from freshmeat, where thers a link to the homepage. Then I
download the thing and after two hours downloading I see that its
already on the non-free CD, so I don't have to fiddle around with the
rpm file.
I might find out about non-free software withour debian giving me a
hint, but why not give the hint? What harm is done? Make it an option
in dselect to turn them off instead of removing them alltogether.
> We are not the User Information Department, what we truly are is
> expressed by this definition:
> >--------------------------------------------------------------------<
> The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made
> common cause to create a free operating system.
> >--------------------------------------------------------------------<
> we shouldn't IMHO forget it.
But Debian is for the users and not for some word written on a html
page. :)
> MS> We do free software a disservice by trying to hide non-free
> MS> software, or making harder to install, on the grounds that we fear
> MS> that too many people may use non-free software if we do so.
>
> We couldn't act like this even if we wanted to. Users have plenty of
> information about non-free software with or without our contribute,
> and even if we stopped building precompiled debs of non-free software,
> we couldn't stop others (and companies) from doing it.
>
> So, how could we make non-free software hidden, or harder to install?
By evely removing all suggests to non-free or contrib. :)
MfG,
Goswin
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