Re: one of the many reasons why removing non-free is a dumb idea
On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 01:07:47PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 08:37:41AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> > That's not true at all. Even packages that are well-maintained can be
> > of very low quality in non-free, especially if you are not running on
> > i386. This is due in part to a lack of autobuilders for non-free.
>
> What has that to do. If the package is only built on i386, or on a
> reduced set of arches, this doesn't imply lower quality, just that it
> has not been ported. And the fact that some arches don't really need it
> is a good thing for its eventual removal.
If a package has source code avaiable, the maintainer might feel the
urge to port it to as many arches as possible. Then, when he wants
update the package, he'd have to recompile on all those arches again in
order to get it into testing (AIUI). This might or might not be possible
all the time, or he might not care about all of the arches anymore. The
non-i386 might eventually get out of sync and rot. This would be
especially the case if non-free Build-Depends are required (or
Build-Depends which are not even avaiable in non-free), as I guess he
couldn't use a Debian box for building the package then. (Dunno how far
the cooperation of DSA goes in this regard)
Of course, things could just go well, that depends on the maintainers
motivation (and possibly others who'd recompile for him).
Michael
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