On 21 Feb 2006, Steve Langasek verbalised: > On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 10:40:06AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: >> On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 05:36:13PM +0100, Robert Millan wrote: >>> I requested that ndiswrapper and ndiswrapper-modules-i386 be moved >>> to contrib. >> While I would personally rather see the "contrib" demarkation cover >> this, emulators, and clients for propietary protocols, I'm >> disinclined to override both the maintainer and the ftpmaster that >> accepted it, particularly on this single issue rather than as a >> global policy change for those issues. I expect I'll either abstain >> or vote against. > > I suspect I disagree with Anthony on where exactly the line should > be drawn, but it does seem to me that the arguments used to justify > ndiswrapper's presence in main are rather contrived. Nobody is > going to want to run drivers under ndiswrapper in a production > environment if there is a suitable free equivalent available for > Linux; the only practical applications I see here are using non-free > Windows drivers under Linux for otherwise-unsupported hardware, and > using ndiswrapper as a tool for preliminary testing of drivers being > written for Windows in an environment that doesn't require booting > Windows. The former is what I use it for, and what every user I > know uses it for, and doesn't justify a claim that ndiswrapper does > not depend on non-free software. The latter, IMHO, would be grounds > for shipping the software in main, but AFAIK this is purely a > hypothetical at this point.
I think Raul pointed out that there are free windows only drivers seen in the wilds out there, in which case ndiswrapper seems to represent an implementation of a protocol that allows windows only code to work with the Linux kernel. Whether or not such free code has been ported to Linux natively should be immaterial, I would draw the line at whether ndiswrapper falls in the category that "installers" do, or in the category that "wine" does. I think it tends to fall in the latter, since it does not seem to be specific to any particular piece of code or driver; and there is nothing that precludes a windows only piece of code that works with ndiswrapper to be licensed freely. > Either way, I do agree with Anthony that one-off overrides of > maintainers don't seem like the best way for us to be spending our > time. While I agree with you both, it is because I thinik that ndiswrapper actually belongs in main. manoj -- If you don't care where you are, then you ain't lost. Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/> 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]