Previously Chris Lawrence wrote:
> Whether or not the proposed GR passes, I believe we need to figure out
> some way of coordinating the Debian-based distributions so we do not
> end up in an "RPM" type of situation where supposedly common formats
> lead to highly inconsistent systems.
Oh great, after a non-technical discussion on debian-devel we now see
a mostly technical discussion on debian-project :)
> 1. Some sort of way to identify the source of a package. Maintainer
> fields are insufficient, since maintainer email addresses may not
> correspond with the distributor. (Consider a maintainer who also
> works for Corel, or maintainers who may decide to produce packages for
> Debian and for the non-commercial distribution including non-free to
> be named later.)
This is already done through the Release-file in an archive. The only
thing that currently reads this is apt, and afaik no libapt frontend
uses it currently.
We probably should put a tag in the package which lists the Distributor,
as well as a bug-reporting address.
> 2. Some master registry of package names.
We already have a policy for package naming iirc, that might suffice.
> 3. Some agreement that redistributed packages will not be gratuitously
> repackaged or modified, perhaps reinforced by an agreement that
> DFSG-free packages will be integrated into Debian and that other
> vendors will be able to provide non-voting Debian maintainers for
> DFSG-free packages. (Rationale: as long as other vendors do not
> actively seek to subvert Debian, and agree to be bound by the DFSG and
> social contract when providing packages to Debian proper, there is
> IMHO no reason to exclude them. And there's no point in each .deb
> vendor gratuitously duplicating work.)
I'm not really sure what you mean here...
> 4. Common agreement on a classification scheme. (Since Debian will
> only distribute DFSG-free packages, and refuses to make policy
> segregating non-free, perhaps Debian would not be involved in this
> part. But non-free includes lots of different subcategories that are
> important to other vendors. For example, WordPerfect Office 2000
> comes in .debs that are incredibly non-free. Pine is a much different
> beast that WPO.)
Sounds like the yearly-proposed NonFree-Because: field
Wichert.
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