Re: How much interest in a "debian-science.org" repository?
Am Freitag, 21. Juli 2006 00:03 schrieb Thomas Walter:
> On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 13:53, Daniel Leidert wrote:
> > Am Mittwoch, den 19.07.2006, 13:03 -0400 schrieb Kevin B. McCarty:
> > I really vote for using the main/contrib/non-free section model. This
> > would also help to see, which packages might be worth a try to get them
> > into Debian officially, which should be the goal in every case.
>
> An answer in this thread said, scientist often don't care about
> licenses. And often they are allowed to do so. Often applications have
> exceptions for non-commercial use or usage for research tasks. The
> latter is easily proven when working for an institute or university.
> As a conclusion, separating science applications into
> main/contrib/non-free does not make much sense in these cases. As
> scientist I can put the most into main.
> So a high level classification into something like libraries, plotting,
> visualisation, WEB, GUI, common, ... (only a collection of items as
> example) would be more appropriate I think.
My two cents: bad idea.
There is a reason why Debian itself does not use such an approach, and it is
precisely the one that was mentioned before: if you split the repository up,
people will either have huge sources.list entries or possibly miss useful
software. And classification may not always be that straightforward either.
Now, for the not caring about licenses argument: that's the idea about the
traditional structure (main, contrib, non-free). Including non-free in your
sources translates to not caring about licenses. RMS will only use main. I,
on the other hand, couldn't care less and so use non-free as well.
To pick up your argument, maybe we ought to include a new section for software
which is free for academic use only, but your proposal overly complicates
things, and besides, a different mechanism for the classification of software
already exists - let's use that.
Kind Regards,
Luca
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