Re: a debian user's vote for the GR
On Fri, Jun 09, 2000 at 12:54:04PM -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
> I have been a Debian user for year and a half now. After having come from a
> Red Hat background, I came to love the quality that Debian offered.
Me too. (Except I came to the fold via SuSE...)
> However, although I did use a few packages from non-free like Netscape for a
> while, I found free replacements like Mozilla and lynx-ssl were more than
> good enough, so I removed non-free and contrib from my sources.list. (I had
> thought that Netscape was free software, but I had gotten it confused with
> Mozilla)
I still use Netscrape. Beyond that I can't think of anything in non-free
that's actually used, but have non-free and contrib just in case.
> I really appreciate the division Debian makes between the two, because
> I love to share software and ideas with my friends, and I know that I
> can share everything from 'main'.
Seconded. The distinction is a good thing to keep folks aware of.
> I am for this General Resolution because it only enhances what I see as the
> best part of Debian; the focus on free software.
I am also generally in favour of it, but could I suggest, "not just yet"? I
think there ought to be a little more feeling of stability / certainty behind
the view "anything non-free can do, main can do better", to the extent that
for most packages in non-free, I should be able to think of preferably 2
replacements / re-implementations. Things like:
rar/unrar, ucbmpeg-play, povray, xv, ckermit, gambc, jdk, mpg123
all of which appear to be in my local mirror atm.
This will involve original work - reimplementing rar might not be possible; it
might well require a completely new set of packages for some of the above.
But my point is that there are these things on which I rely, from which I want
to jump. So soon, when the replacements exist, but not just yet.
~Tim
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