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Re: Suggestions for vrms package?



On (16/12/05 08:35), Rogério Brito wrote:
> Hi there, people.
> 
> I'm currently one of the maintainers of the "virtual Richard
> M. Stallman" package (vrms), whose purpose is to indicate to the user
> which packages installed in his system are not Free Software.
> 
> The package had active development up to 2002 and, then, it wasn't given
> so much attention.  As a user of it, I thought that I could lend it a
> hand trying to fix some problems and doing some janitorial work on the
> Bug Tracking System (BTS) part of vrms.
> 
> This resulted in some "new life" in the development of vrms [1] and a
> move to a team maintainership [2], with the source package being
> developed on Debian's Alioth server [3, 4].
> 
> So, I would like to ask you to, please, install it, use it, suggest what
> could be improved (preferrably reporting the bugs to the BTS) and tell
> us of any bugs that you encounter.  For those not aware of it, you can
> report a bug against a package with the use of the nice "reportbug"
> program (in the reportbug package).
> 
> I think that the package has huge ways to be improved and, as always,
> any help is welcome.
> 
> I firmly believe that the Free Software applications that we have today
> are mature enough (and also sufficient) that we can drop most of the use
> of non-free packages.
> 
> In the pursuit of this task, I think that vrms is an important
> assessment tool, so that the user knows how much non-free software his
> system has installed and which Free Software alternatives exist.

I use it and it seems to work well :)  It reports that all my servers
are running free software and for my laptop:

Non-free packages installed on Darius

nvidia-kernel-source      NVIDIA binary kernel module source

  1 non-free packages, 0.2% of 648 installed packages.
(nv works well for me and so I've not tried the nvidia driver)

I'm at a bit of a loss as to what you're thinking in terms of
development; ie. what more one would want it to do unless you're
thinking along the lines of recommended free alternatives to proprietary
software.

I checked out the alioth page and not much has seemed to have happened
since August.  

This is not a criticism; I share your enthusiasm for the using free
software wherever possible.  I guess I'm suffering from a lack of
imagination :)

Regards

Clive

-- 
www.clivemenzies.co.uk ...
...strategies for business




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