Re: Non-freeness
"J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)" wrote:
>
> On Mon, Dec 20, 1999 at 16:15:51 +0000, Stuart Ballard wrote:
> > Now, I thought that ssh (at least openSSH) was non-US/main - wasn't that
> > kind of the point of using openSSH rather than what we had before?
>
> Yes. Potato's current "ssh" package is OpenSSH and is free.
Then why is vrms reporting it? Is this a vrms bug?
> > And dnsutils - why on earth should I need non-free software to query dns
> > servers?
>
> dnsutils is built from the bind source, which contains non-free code from
> RSA labs dealing with secure DNS. I believe arrangements have been made with
> the ISC that will make / have made it possible for bind's source to go in
> main again.
Cool.
> > In other words, a very brief summary of the problem (with a reference to
> > the license), a list of alternatives, and the possible problems you
> > might encounter with each alternative.
>
> This would be a useful list to have - perhaps you've found your way to
> contribute to Debian?
Well, there are a *lot* of packages in non-free, so I think the way to
do it would be on a package-by-package basis, arranged by
Policy-with-a-capital-Pee :) I guess I could subscribe to the policy
list and suggest this...
My thought would be having a standardized file in
/usr[/share]/doc/packagename for every package in non-free, called
something like README.Debian-nonfree.gz, containing this information in
a standardized format (like the changelog.Debian already has). Maybe
another one called README.Debian-nonus.gz for non-US packages too.
If this happened I'd certainly consider submitting the trivial changes
to enable vrms to make use of this file ;)
Stuart.
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