On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 6:43 AM, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > Without trying to get a cleaner sheet first, vrms says: > Firmwares, documentation (make-doc, manpages-posix{,-dev}), rar (I had > to open a RAR 3.0 archive some time ago, and forgot to remove the package), > flashplugin-nonfree, virtualbox.
GNU has re-licensed some of its documentation to plain GFDL, it would be interesting if the next DPL talk to the FSF about the rest of it during their term. For opening RAR 3.0 archives, you can replace rar with unar these days. For virtual machines, virt-manager is quite capable these days. My personal solution to Flash is to just remove it from my system. The only time I miss it is when one of the many video downloaders we have in Debian doesn't know how to download. Then I usually do some website reverse engineering and send a patch. > Is our position wrt non-free software really part of the five general > principles that make us work together as a project? I don't think so. I get the impression that our pragmatic approach to non-free attracts people to Debian. > Finally, the wording of SC#5 is suboptimal. For example, in "although > non-free works are not a part of Debian, we support their use", the > meaning of "support" could be clarified. Is it 'we provide technical > support' or 'we defend/endorse their use'? I think it means 'we provide technical support' since that is in practice what we do, rarely if ever do our websites or software endorse/defend their use even when suggesting that software from there is needed for some specific purpose. I think we could do a better job of discouraging use of non-free (just submitted #742550 about that) in places where users are likely to encounter it (installer, packages site, apt & frontends etc). > However, I wonder if we couldn't do more in terms of notifying users that > the package they are installing is in non-free. Currently, what happens is > that you add 'non-free' in sources.list, but then you kind-of forget about > it, and packages from main, contrib and non-free are just the same from the > POV of 'apt-cache search' or 'apt-get install'. It could be interesting to > explore the idea of asking for an install-time confirmation when the user > wants to install non-free packages. A couple of bugs along those lines: #274219 #680330 In practice almost everyone has non-free in their sources.list due to most firmware being non-free. Also most developers will have non-free in their sources.list due to various GNU documentation being in non-free. Also most users will have non-free in their sources.list due to things like Flash. At DebConf we discussed adding additional sub-components (non-free/docs non-free/hw non-free/web non-free/games etc) for different purposes. People needing specific classes of non-free software could then enable just those subclasses that they need. I think this would help in addition to your suggestion. -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/CAKTje6HDEHSruC=fpbqtpv6+z7euzujehuk_1rfn7rvq3ut...@mail.gmail.com