John H. Robinson, IV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > my experience with the installer .deb's is limited mostly to the > installers made for pine and djbware. > > they download the source, patch the source, then build the source. the > result is a .deb. that .deb can then be installed. since it is a .deb > installed by dpkg, it is under dpkg control and can be removed at any > time. the additional benefit is that you can take that .deb and install > it elsewhere, too. > > this works for things like pine and djbware, since the source code is > available. for things like flash or MS Office, source would not be > available. the installer making a .deb out of a binary distribution may > be harder, but i feel that it is certainly possible.
It's in fact easier. Just `mv' the binary to debian/tmp/usr/bin. XForms use to be like this. > Mathieu Roy wrote: > > > I think that, at least, these installer, to be included in debian, > > should be forced to build a real debian package for this non-free > > software, when installing it. That's a good idea! > the ones that i am familir with do exactly that. i cannot speak for all > of them, though. Most don't. > > Some packages clearly identified that vrms can clearly identify, some > > package we can easily track and remove completely at will. > > IIRC, the qmail.deb is placed into section Local, which is why VRMS does > not notice it. > > > So I think it would be appropriate to fill a bug for any of these > > installers, asking them to build a correct debian package for the > > software they install. > > > > What do you think? > > i would not mind if the installer's built .deb were listed as section > non-free, so vrms could pick it up. wishlist bug, but yes it's a good idea. It could become policy when enough of then do it. Peter