Re: non-free?
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
> On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 11:51 PM, Neil McGovern wrote:
>> I don't think that splitting this up helps our users. Using debian.org
>> provides a trusted distribution mechanism. I think it's better that
>> people get trusted non-free packages from us, than get them from a
>> random third party by burying our heads in the sand and pretending
>> non-free software doesn't exist.
> I agree with the last sentence there and note that this doesn't seem
> to preclude a split between non-free.org and debian.org (a split in
> name only).
This seems like quite a lot of work (for all of our users who use non-free
as well as for us) for marginal benefit to me. Renaming things usually
produces quite a lot of pain, and I think it's worth having a pretty solid
reason for doing so before subjecting everyone to that pain.
As long as non-free is maintained as part of the project using normal
project tools, albeit not an official part of our distribution, I don't
think renaming the domain to something other than debian.org is very
significant. It would make sense as part of ejecting non-free from the
project entirely (which I would object to), but I don't think that's a
likely outcome or something you'd propose.
If one of our upstreams said that they wanted to rename a public API in a
widely-used shared library because they thought the old name wasn't very
accurate, we would almost certainly beg them not to, due to all of the
pain this would cause for marginal benefit. I encourage people to think
of the archive URLs in the same light. If anything, the pain is even
worse.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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