Re: Data does NOT belong in Debian (was: Stop Archive bloat)
> Hi,
>
> > NO!! RFCs are *very* important when writing software. They are the
> > standards upon which a large amount of free software is based and are
> > absolutely crucial to developers. Why should they have to hunt the
> > web for such stuff?
>
> I think it's possible for _everyone_ to mirror (for example)
> http://www.rfc-editor.org/categories/rfc-standard.html on his computer if he
> wants these things.
>
> There are also other ways to do it. (e.g. I have written a few scripts which
> make it possible to keep a local 'cache' of rfc documents and if I need one
> which is not in there it gets automatically fetched.)
>
> I think everyone is able to find a solution for these day-to-day tasks.
> These are not the problem a distribution should cover.
Such scripts would be a very useful addition to the archive.
Also, you have to realise that not everyone has a decent (or cheap)
net connection, and looking through dozens of RFCs can take a long
time if they are not locally available.
There is a huge amount of stuff which is easy to
download/mirror/whatever, but one of the nice things about Debian is
that important things are available as standard on the CDs of the
distribution. I personally regard RFCs as generally important to
anyone programming any net-aware or net-related software.
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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