Package: ftp.debian.org
Severity: wishlist
Hi,
One suggestion that's come up a few times over the years in the handling
of the non-free suite is to split it up into several sub-suites. In the
most extreme form of this suggestion, non-free and contrib would be
split up into a suite for each and every package that's in non-free,
where each sub-suite would contain just its package and the non-free
dependencies of that particular package (if any), so that people can say
"I want to install package X, but nothing else from non-free".
While such an approach does have its merits, I do think it would require
wide-reaching changes to dak in order to be able to support it, and
wouldn't provide much benefit over a less extreme approach.
If we scale this down a bit, I think it should be possible to support
the suggested split today, and it would also be a useful split if we did
so; but as I don't really know dak all that well, please do correct me
if I'm wrong.
My suggestion would be to split non-free into the following sub-suites:
- non-free/hardware: for "hardware support" packages: non-free firmware
packages ("firmware-iwlwifi"), non-free drivers ("nvidia-glx"), etc.
- non-free/gfdl: for GFDL-licensed documentation. I first considered
suggesting a non-free/doc repository; but most non-free
documentation currently in Debian is GFDL-licensed anyway, and I also
think it's probably more useful to have something which is considered
free by our friends of the FSF, so that those who want can say
"install whatever the FSF would consider free". I don't feel too
strong about that, though.
- non-free/codec: for codecs in the widest sense of the word. This
wouldn't be just non-free multimedia codecs, but also non-free
archivers, such as rar-nonfree; anything that contains an algorithm to
encode or decode a particular file format would be allowed into this
repository.
In addition, I would suggest that non-free, as it exists today, would
remain in existence. That is, packages wouldn't be moved from non-free
to any of the suggested repositories; instead, they would be *copied*
there. This would have two advantages:
- Upgrades would not be more complicated
- Packages that don't fall in any of the above categories don't have to
find a new home, nor do we need to figure out other categories or
create a generic "non-free/other" category or some such.
Thoughts?
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