Re: Notice: GR to remove non-free support from Debian
I've been following this thread on debian-devel for a few days now...
I am against the proposal myself, but I don't have any say because I'm
not a Debian developer.
Andrew George wrote:
>
> I don't think this is a good thing.
> Debian is a great distribution, and I do agree, the project shouldn't be
> wasting time with bug trackking (except where its the deb that got a problem).
> But to do this on a philosophical point is only going to cause problems for the
> user base and make it less attractive to new users.
>
> Personally, if things like Netscape are removed from the archieves, then all
> I'm going to do is install my own tarballs, the negative effect of that (and
> the fact that it reduces teh effect of the deb database) can't help Debian.
The proposal will only remove non-free from the Debian archives. It will
not stop it from being distributed -- non-free will just be distributed
from somewhere other than the Debian ftp site and its mirrors.
The real change is that non-free will no longer be covered by the same
bug tracking system as the rest of Debian. This will have the most
effect on the packages in the contrib section that depend on packages in
non-free. This is the main reason for my objection to the proposal.
The non-free section would turn into something similar to the debian KDE
site, except to my knowledge there isn't any package on the official
debian site that depends on a KDE package.
> Also, I hope no-one takes this the wrong way, but I always assumed that the
> developer list would be talking about finally turning potatoe stable, or maybe
> addressing he fact that it's been over a year between Slink and Potatoe.
Indeed.
> (PS the fact that Woody exists at all while Potatoe is still 'unstable' is
> another thing I would have thought the developers would be discussing)
By all accounts, Potato is quite stable, although officially it is
'frozen' (not 'unstable').
Matthew
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