On Sat, Jun 26, 1999 at 03:23:41AM -0600, Richard Stallman wrote:
> The programs in contrib are free, but many programs are put in contrib
> because they are not useful in an all-free system. Many depend on
> non-free packages to be useful.
>
> I think these programs should be kept with the non-free packages.
>
> On the other hand, some programs are in contrib for another reason.
> Perhaps they ought to be on the server with main. Perhaps the contrib
> category should be split into two category for packages that have some
> sort of freedom problem (although they are free software), and one for
> the rest of what is now in contrib.
We've already determined the stuff in contrib because of non-us needs to
be moved to non-us itself ...
Otherwise just about everything in contrib has dependency on non-free
software. For example one of my packages (joeyh's work, I adopted it
from him) is an install wrapper to make quake's .pak files from an
already installed quake useful with the quake binaries. The install
wrapper is itself free. It does depend on quake---but since .pak files
may be manipulated without quake, those could possibly go away (and might
as soon as I get something packaged which can.
If someone produces free replacements for those files, I'd LOVE to
package them---but they too would have to go in contrib because the
purpose of these things is to be used with quake. When we have quake
source (hopefully under a free license, hope, hope, hope ...) I'd try to
help as much as I could with creation of a free dataset to use with it.
And I'd be more than happy to move quake-lib-stub to main then.
But until all of that happens, quake-lib-stub belongs with non-free, even
though it's perfectly free itself. It's just not useful right now
without non-free code.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Debian GNU/Linux developer
PGP: E8D68481E3A8BB77 8EE22996C9445FBE The Source Comes First!
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