On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 02:39:28PM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote: > For example, we thought that some LDP documents are troublesome. > Incidentially, the licenses of all LDP documents have been sorted out > recently (Colin Watson was active at that), so this item seems to be > resolved.
Not quite, following a discussion with the release manager - but it certainly will be in the green and promised land after woody. > 2. The external solution, this would mean that the FSF builds a distribution > on top of Debian, which would really be mostly identical, with just a few > changes. For example, some packages might be removed from main for license > reasons. Some default configuration files might be changed to elide > references to non-free. > > I have spent a bit of time (not enough) on the external solution, as I hoped > that this would be the way of least resistance and maximum independence. > It turns out that building such a distribution is not easy. For example, I > had the idea of a repository in the FSF network which contains the > necessary changes to the Debian repository, and otherwise just references to > the Debian mirrors. But removing packages reliably seems to be impossible > this way. If somebody has ideas about this, let me know. I'd say that the FSF ought to be building its own Packages file, which shouldn't be *too* difficult, provided that some care is taken to avoid packages suddenly losing dependencies. Perhaps it might be worth talking to people like Progeny who have maintained slightly-forked versions of Debian in the past. > For example, just to remind everyone, RMS is not asking that Debian removes > non-free and contrib. However, he requires that someone installing the > GNU system will not have the option to add those to the apt config offered > to him. So apt would be a good candidate to be replaced with a version of > apt that contains a different sources.list configuration file, as one > example (external solution). Alternatively, Debian could have a hidden flag > that could be triggered by the FSF that does the same thing without > overriding apt or other packages (internal solution). Sounds like this could be implemented with minor changes to base-config and/or debootstrap. It feels like most of the problems should be soluble using a Debian mirror with exclusions (could be implemented with reverse-depends logic from libapt-pkg feeding into the exclude list of a mirroring tool) plus an FSF autobuilder that helps to maintain the necessary forked versions. I confess that I've never personally done anything like this, though. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
