Re: Statistics on non-free usage
http://people.debian.org/~ballombe/popcon/ was meant to replace
http://people.debian.org/~apenwarr/popcon/
Avery Pennarun's page (apenwarr) has been reportedly broken in the past.
I'm unsure as to it's current accuracy, as it's linked to from
http://popcon.alioth.debian.org/ I would guess that it's been fixed.
I appreciate the efforts of looking at what packages outside of main are
used, but I don't think it proves much. I would however like to see kaffe
fixed, a DFSG unrar (note the basic LZW patent is still in effect in
Canada!), and a better DFSG pdf reader.
As to the quality of j2re1.4 I would defer to debian-java. Blackdown has
been making debs for quite a while now and I haven't heard many
complaints (other than it's not in Debian or non-free). We have certainly
been hurt by our current java implementations as packages like
OpenOffice.org have to turn java off to get into main...
It has been suggested in the past that it might be beneficial for packages
in non-free to list free alternatives. I'd recommend filing wishlist bugs
where possible.
Please see the mailing list archives for comparisons of acroread vs the
DFSG pdf readers that we have. It's interesting that the DFSG readers
can't even support some of the pdf's that the old distributable acroread
could. I haven't checked myself, but maybe things have changed?
Take a look at the Maximum Compression comparison and you'll see that
ppmd would be a good replacement for rar/unrar if only it were more widely
used. Unfortunately it isn't so we should probably look at packaging a DFSG
unrar package. I believe there was discussion on DFSG archive tools in
debian-devel last year sometime that brought about the addition of some
new packages.
Drew Daniels
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