Re: Moving contrib and non-free of master.debian.org
Wichert Akkerman - Debian project leader <leader@debian.org> writes:
> [1 <text/plain; us-ascii (quoted-printable)>]
>
> I already mentioned a while ago that I think that the distinction
> between main and contrib & non-free is becoming less clear, both
> to users and developers.
>
> The Debian distribution itself consists only of the main-tree. Contrib
> and non-free are there mostly as a (popular) service to our users. But
> the distinction isn't as visible as it used to be; advances in searching
> in the distribution and tools like apt make it very hard to see when
> something is in main and when not. Just using seperate trees in the
> archive isn't as effective a method making the distinction anymore as it
> used to be.
apt is a wonderful tool, which makes the distinction between free and
non-free less obvious to the user. Moving non-free software to
non-free.debian.org doesn't solve the problem. apt still grabs the
files transparently, as it should do. In fact, binary distributions,
with no source code available, would be just as transparent, once
/etc/apt/sources.list is modified.
If we really want to solve the problem, we should make it obvious that
the files being downloaded are not from a designated free tree.
Perhaps gnome-apt could display an evil-looking icon for non-free
software.
--
Kevin Dalley
kevind@rahul.net
--IAC27471.930066459/laminaria.seti.org--
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