Re: one of the many reasons why removing non-free is a dumb idea
On Fri, Jan 09, 2004 at 02:15:12PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> 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).
BTW, the packages i care about in non-free are arch: all (for docs), or
arch: x86 (for the unicorn driver obiously).
So this is not really a concern.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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