On Fri, Jun 16, 2000 at 03:43:06PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> > And, lastly, Debian providing all this makes non-free software easier to
> > maintain and easier to obtain, and, IMO, making life easier is a moral
> > good too.
> apt can pull from anywhere.
And dinstall? The BTS? The mirror network? The keyring? Policy?
> Apparently your argument boils down to this: can people get non-free
> software and maintain it outside of debian.org? I see absolutely no
> reason why they cannot.
What demonstration of the difficulties would you accept?
For example, in justification of your arguments that removing non-free
wouldn't create a significant burden on anyone, I'd accept a distribution
network outside of Debian that reflects Debian's structure: that allows
signed uploads to stable and unstable, that has a working BTS, that
has a mirror, that has a working keyring and allows both the existing
Debian maintainers to login and new maintainers (that have been accepted
into Debian already, or that only want to work on non-free software and
haven't) to be added.
Even given all that, I'll still believe it's a needless increase of
effort: maintaining all the above infrastructure, and working out extra
items of policy that only apply to non-free software, and resolving any
conflicts (main/foo now includes /usr/lib/bar/baz, what does non-free/bar
do now???), and duplicating any changes to Debian's infrastructure
(oh, bleh, they've made another release and changed libc and binary
compatability _again_)... But it would be a fairly decent demonstration
that Debian's infrastructure is, in spite of my beliefs, fairly easy to
duplicate.
What would convince you that it's not, apart from having this resolution
succeed, and no non-free archive appear?
Cheers,
aj, who notes normally you're not meant to have to argue a negative
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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