On Sun, Apr 06, 2003 at 10:17:15AM +0200, nikos@altern.org wrote: > > Because somebody packaged them. > > Do you accept any package? Fortunately not! You don't accept any for technical reasons (for example, in the Debian Weekly News issued February 18th, 2003, it was considered to remove a package which contained an easter egg. I quote: "Removing mICQ from Debian? Martin Loschwitz proposed to remove mICQ from Debian entirely since the upstream author has placed a harmful and obfuscated easter egg in the code, bypassing the maintainer's testing."). But I'm also confident in Debian for don't accepting packages which defend xenophobic ideas for example. So why are these packages here? Are the ideas in these packages xenophobic? The anarchism package isn't really. Whether or not you think that Debian is an example of anarchism in action is irrelevant when you consider the fact that many other people do (go search the list archives for the massive thread on the subject). And as for the bible-kjv, it's actually a software program that's meant to browse text. As the description says, "it could, in principle, be used for any text". The software is Free, and is thus in accordance with the Social Contract, and the software becomes useful by having something to browse, in this case it's the King James Bible, which is a very useful text for a large number of people (it is, after all, the most widely read book in the world). Finally, the mICQ example you cite is a rather crude one that goes well beyond the realm of the technical in to issues of trustworthiness. Go read the thread that DWN refers to before comparing that to other rejections. mICQ was a unique example. I've not followed such things closely, nor am I an FTP master who's in charge of such things, but most packages aren't rejected, but instead they are debated about in -devel during an ITP as to whether or not they are truly useful. If they're both Free and useful, they are allowed in, and if not it's usually the person who issued the ITP who backs off rather than having their package rejected. - David
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