Re: Another Non-Free Proposal

[Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>]

On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 02:45:34PM -0500, Dale E Martin wrote:
> What if today we put in a CNAME for nonfree.org to debian.org and then
> configured apache to not show non-free directories for people coming in on
> debian.org http requests?  (Ignore ftp and rsync for the moment for the
> sake of discussion.)  Would doing just _that much_ be too much of an
> inconvience to the users?  If it is, then what would it take to make that
> much of a change palatable?

I can't think of any reason why that much change would be something we
couldn't do:

[a] It doesn't violate the social contract -- in fact, it might be more
in keeping with the social contract than the current state of affairs,

[b] It doesn't prevent users from getting the packages.

However, this change isn't completely trivial, because any mirrors
which are not configured to use the new domain name will simply freeze
non-free in the state it was last in when available from the current
debian.org servers.  

This is suboptimal for server whose administrators wish to mirror non-free
[because of staleness].  This is suboptimal for server administrators
who would decide to no longer distribute non-free [because they wouldn't
have known about the event, and would still be distributing non-free].
Of course, this wouldn't affect mirrors which already do not distribute
non-free.

At the very least, if we do this, we would also want to announce the
change ahead of time (saying roughly when the change will happen),
and then announce afterwords that we've done it.

Thanks,

-- 
Raul