Re: Moving contrib and non-free of master.debian.org
On Jun 23, Giuliano Procida wrote:
> Untrue! (Social Contract section 5 is misleading) You may have always
> treated contrib as "unofficial" but it is often fully supported GPL
> software. Plenty of other people do not share your view. Put another
> way, you may lump contrib with non-free, plenty of people lump it with
> main (they are both DFSG). I believe the fact that the source is DSFG
> is more important than the existence of any dependency on currently
> encumbered items. See http://www.debian.org/distrib/packages as well.
One very important category of contrib software is omitted: packages
that depend on free software in non-US. A frontend for GnuPG would
fall into this category, for example (dunno if such a beast exists,
but I can code one in ten minutes to prove my point :p).
So contrib does have value independent of non-free.
At one point, we also used it as a quasi-experimental dist for buggy
packages; I dunno if policy still permits that practice or not. (Of
course, some of us use main for this too! :-)
Chris
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