Josh Triplett wrote:
Evan Prodromou wrote:
On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 19:02, Josh Triplett wrote:
While I agree that it is not necessarily required that a Free package
Depend on some piece of Free data for it to operate on, I do believe
that if there is _no_ Free data for the package to run with, and that
data is required in order to operate, then the package must go in
contrib until at least one free piece of data is available.
I just don't think that software Depends: on the data it manipulates the
way that it Depends: on, say, libraries or other programs.
From Debian Policy section 3.5:
Every package must specify the dependency information about other
packages that are required for the first to work correctly.
Emulators do not work correctly without software to emulate.
Emulators work perfectly correctly without software to emulate. NO$GMB
does the same thing with no image loaded that my gameboy does with no
cartridge in the slot. Pacifist (I assume) does the same thing with no
BIOS that a real Atari ST does if you pull out its BIOS chips*.
Many emulators are for systems that are well-documented (indeed, a Free
emulator is a good source of documentation in and of itself), and can be
used as a basis for developing one's own software, regardless of whether
Free software for the platform has yet been written, or packaged in
Debian. In addition, emulator components can be used in writing ones own
emulator, perhaps to prototype some embedded system.
Back in the day, for many 8 and 16-bit era consoles and computers, the
preferred form for modification was the ROM image itself, or rather
rudimentary assembler (indeed, many spectrum games were written on
paper, and assembled by hand). Debian already provides a development
environment comparable to this.
The policy requires packages to list as a dependency other packages
which are necessary for it to operate correctly, not other packages that
are necessary for it to behave in manner entertaining to an end user. In
my opinion, an emulator bundled with a development environment depends
on nothing else to work correctly; for most systems emulated to date,
Debian provides an environment that can be used to develop software.
The requirement to find/write and package an arbitrary Free program for
the platform strikes me as a ridiculous hurdle - either any program will
do, in which case a program so trivial that the end-user could knock one
up after reading the manual for a few minutes (a few bytes of assembler
to flash the screen, for instance) is sufficient, or the program must be
judged against some arbitrary criteria of usefulness, which is a
requirement no other type of program in Debian is held to.
--
Lewis Jardine
IANAL IANADD