Re: The "Free" vs. "Non-Free" issue

[Raul Miller <moth@magenta.com>]

> On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 10:10:32AM -0500, Raul Miller wrote:
> > Personally, I don't think the free/non-free issue is the right place to
> > hit, if we are trying to manage our ftp servers.

On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 02:45:59PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> The entire size of non-free is smaller than queue/accepted gets on
> some days. I don't believe there's any significant efforts spent on
> supporting non-free software at the moment that isn't also necessary
> for supporting main.

Which just underlines the situation.

> > What I think should be the case for mirror operators:  they should
> > be able to drop non-free, contrib (and even extra) as they see fit.
> 
> They certainly can -- by not mirroring the pool/non-free directory, and the
> appropriate Packages files. AFAIK this isn't done much, because it doesn't
> buy anything: non-free is trivial compared to main in all the appropriate
> measures.

That works for non-free and contrib.  That wouldn't work for filtering on
priority, with the current archive structure.  [However, if that's needed,
I think I could write a mirroring script which would also efficiently
filter on priority in an afternoon, including testing.]

> > It would make a lot of sense to have a mix of numerous fast mirrors which
> > only distribute debian's core packages, with a few larger/slower mirrors
> > which distribute a wider variety of packages.  
> 
> Which is to say, while that's true, differentiating non-free isn't helpful
> towards that goal.

Which reminds me of my questions about the current proposal.

I would support (and vote for) the proposal if it were reasonable.
In my mind, reasonable means:

    Deals with a problem which needs to be solved, identifies the reasons
    why this is a significant problem and proposes a constructive solution
    which addresses those reasons.

So far, the proposals have gotten as far as "Deals with a problem".
[In the sense that we have a conflict of opinion between people who
think non-free is a thing we should support and people who think that
non-free is not a thing we should support].

But where's the rest of it?

-- 
Raul