On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 12:48:14AM +0000, Benjamin A'Lee wrote: > On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 11:06:53AM +1100 or thereabouts, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > > Yes, of course. So, we could technically distribute ROMs for atari800 if > > we found some that met the DFSG, and then we could move atari800 to > > main. We could technically distribute an ICQ server if we had one that > > met the DFSG, but we already distribute the client in main. Why? > > Because it's not necessary to install an ICQ server to be able to use > an ICQ client? Whereas Perl or an emulator are fairly useless on > their own.
Right: some emulators are fairly useless without some kind of image (eg. a BIOS image), just as some drivers are fairly useless without some kind of image (eg. a firmware blob). If all of the pieces were packaged, foo-driver would probably Depend on foo-driver-firmware, and a Playstation emulator might depend on psx-bios-image, but the icq client wouldn't depend on icq-server. (Not that policy's Depends: is necessarily equivalent to the SC's "require" in all cases, but it seems to line up here.) icq-client does require access to a server to be useful, but there's no expectation that that server be installable by the machine running the client; the lack of an icq-server package is not a "piece missing" from the client. -- Glenn Maynard