Hi, On 24/03/13 at 15:47 -0300, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote: > There are third party vendors (read: propietary) that support the > installation > of their software in Debian, but mostly because selfish reasons: they need to > be present everywhere for their business model to work. A clear example of > this is Skype. > > Now there is a second class of apps/vendors which do not need to be ubiquitous > for their business model to work. Most of the examples that come to my mind > are CAD-related: Synopsys [0], Cadence [1] and Mentor [2] are examples of > propietary vendors that give support for Linux but just on Red Hat and > sometimes, Suse. And they are a PITA to make them work on Debian. This makes > IT workers need to have RH/Suse/CentOS boxes even if the rest of them run > Debian. > > Sometimes the Debian support is a *.deb made from the RPM packages with > alien, > but this is just a small rant :-) > > [0] <http://www.synopsys.com/home.aspx> > [1] <http://www.cadence.com/us/pages/default.aspx> > [2] <http://www.mentor.com/> > > Now my question is: without going against the Social Contract, is there > anything Debian can/should do wrt this situation?
First, I'd like to extend the question a bit. - Yes, not everything is packaged in Debian - Yes, some people are providing software by other means: + Debian packages distributed outside Debian + static binary packages + scripts that download and install the whole world + etc. As Moray said, we should advertise more heavily why it's useful to package for Debian. But I think that we should also aim at making it easier to: - package that software as proper Debian packages - distribute that software inside Debian (when it is legally possible) That means: - providing more/better documentation about packaging - providing easier access paths to Debian (e.g. facilitate finding a sponsor) (I elaborated on that in other mails, so I'm not going to do it here again :) ) Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130329094516.ga24...@xanadu.blop.info
