Re: Torque in Debian?
Hello,
Jordi Mallach wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 04:50:21PM +0100, Morten Kjeldgaard wrote:
>> Oh, that. Yes it is a complicated situation, which doesn't get any
>> better by the fact that the Torque maintainers don't give a d*mn
>> about license issues. AFAIK several people have emailed them about
>> it and they never answer. The current Torque effort is the result of
>> several forked projects the history of which are pretty much lost in
>> the annals... in my memory at least :-)
>
> Wow, it seems the confusions keep going even when we have a common
> SVN for the torque packaging. Having several active branches doesn't
> help, though.
>
> I had been working on fixes to packaging in the 2.3.x_ubuntu branch,
> as I had been told (or so I thought) that it was the 2.3.x version that
> we wanted to upload to Debian, in order to cause as little disruption
> as possible to the Debian -> Ubuntu merge. Now I learn I should have
> been working in trunk. Should I merge my work there?
I am somewhat lost myself. Yes, I wanted to upload the Ubuntu approach of 2.3
and then move towards the Debian approach for 2.4, but I have never uploaded
anything for 2.3 because of my uncertainty about it being in main or non-free.
Now 2.4 is out and there should only be a single 2.4 branch left.
In my perception, Morten is the boss as he already has the package in Ubuntu. I
am not aware of advancements on 2.4, which at best would be sent to Debian for
a subsequent sync by Ubuntu. Morten?
>> In Ubuntu, the torque package resides in "Multiverse" which
>> corresponds to the "non-free" section of Debian. Torque has it's own
>> peculiar license which tends to make the archive-admins nervous. It
>> is my conviction however, that Torque in practice is FOSS perhaps
>> even FLOSS.
>
> I don't agree that «multiverse» corresponds 100% to «non-free». I think
> there are several pieces of software in Debian main that are kept in
> Ubuntu multiverse. In any case, back when I started packaging torque and
> then joined the common effort, I looked torque's licence and couldn't
> find anything that could make it plain non-free. If my opinion counts,
> we should make our initial upload target main, and let the ftp team
> decide. We shouldn't go the non-free route just because we don't knw
> what they'll say. If the package is rejected, it's very easy to reupload
> with the changed sections.
The FTP team is only human. I think. We should not bring Debian into trouble
just because we could not decide for ourselves and the FTP team made an error
in judgement. In my (updated) mind, what is not clearly free is non-free.
Many greetings
Steffen
Reply to: