Previously Chris Lawrence wrote: > Whether or not the proposed GR passes, I believe we need to figure out > some way of coordinating the Debian-based distributions so we do not > end up in an "RPM" type of situation where supposedly common formats > lead to highly inconsistent systems. Oh great, after a non-technical discussion on debian-devel we now see a mostly technical discussion on debian-project :) > 1. Some sort of way to identify the source of a package. Maintainer > fields are insufficient, since maintainer email addresses may not > correspond with the distributor. (Consider a maintainer who also > works for Corel, or maintainers who may decide to produce packages for > Debian and for the non-commercial distribution including non-free to > be named later.) This is already done through the Release-file in an archive. The only thing that currently reads this is apt, and afaik no libapt frontend uses it currently. We probably should put a tag in the package which lists the Distributor, as well as a bug-reporting address. > 2. Some master registry of package names. We already have a policy for package naming iirc, that might suffice. > 3. Some agreement that redistributed packages will not be gratuitously > repackaged or modified, perhaps reinforced by an agreement that > DFSG-free packages will be integrated into Debian and that other > vendors will be able to provide non-voting Debian maintainers for > DFSG-free packages. (Rationale: as long as other vendors do not > actively seek to subvert Debian, and agree to be bound by the DFSG and > social contract when providing packages to Debian proper, there is > IMHO no reason to exclude them. And there's no point in each .deb > vendor gratuitously duplicating work.) I'm not really sure what you mean here... > 4. Common agreement on a classification scheme. (Since Debian will > only distribute DFSG-free packages, and refuses to make policy > segregating non-free, perhaps Debian would not be involved in this > part. But non-free includes lots of different subcategories that are > important to other vendors. For example, WordPerfect Office 2000 > comes in .debs that are incredibly non-free. Pine is a much different > beast that WPO.) Sounds like the yearly-proposed NonFree-Because: field Wichert. -- _________________________________________________________________ / Generally uninteresting signature - ignore at your convenience \ | wichert@liacs.nl http://www.liacs.nl/~wichert/ | | 1024D/2FA3BC2D 576E 100B 518D 2F16 36B0 2805 3CB8 9250 2FA3 BC2D |
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