Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes: > If it's only useful for non-free software, we should probably consider > it. More likely, it's not useful at all, and we should consider > dropping it entirely. How many libraries do we have in this state?
We went through this whole discussion with emulators, with people pushing them towards contrib under the theory that there was no free firmware for them to play. Then people packaged various free firmware just to get the emulators back into main. This process strikes me as a significant waste of time and energy, and I'm not sure what it's supposed to accomplish. If the package absolutely requires a piece of non-free software to work, or if it's an installer for non-free software (such as the various installer packages or the packaging wrappers around djb software), it goes in contrib. If it just implements some sort of API or ABI that isn't specific to some *particular* piece of non-free software, I think shoving it towards contrib is just a waste of everyone's time. As we already saw with emulators, free uses of that API or ABI tend to eventually materialize, making this distinction requires drawing a lot of thin and hazy lines, and (worst of all) it always sparks long, pointless threads about the definition of freedom on debian-devel. I don't think the distinction between main and contrib should be so unstable as to change based on the existence of some theoretical piece of third-party software. As long as the software implements some reasonably generic API or ABI that isn't inherently non-free and doesn't require a dependency on non-free software in the dpkg sense, I say just put it in main and not worry about whether anyone has used that API or ABI in free software yet. It saves on moving things around later, I can't see how it breaks anything in the DFSG, and it means one less controversial grey area decision that we have to make all the time. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]