On Mon, 2 Sep 1996, Bdale Garbee wrote: > Right now, the contrib and non-free trees are, by definition, "unstable" > since they aren't frozen at release time. I don't think this is very nice > for folks who are trying to run "latest stable" bits all the time.
There are prominent notices in both the contrib and non-free directories that software contained there is not an official part of Debian. It's therefore not unreasonable to require users to install packages from unstable to use contrib and non-free packages. > Another way of looking at it that I spent some time on one weekend is that > what you really want on the FTP server is something like a versioned > filesystem > effect, where you could have an "object pool" of packages with potentially > multiple revisions per package present. This is just a more general restatement of the problem. It is more complex and has advantages which we don't require, among them allowing other than two versions per package and a small cost for more than two releases. > I thought it would be easy to make > 'contrib' and 'non-free' be directories at the same level as 'base', 'devel', > and so forth... but met some reluctance about "making it harder" for CD-ROM > folk to do the right things by having these trees exist inside a release tree. And it violates our assertion that they are not official parts of Debian. > Seems like a report to the owners of packages in question indicating > issues with the dependency tree for files installed in the stable/unstable > hierarchies would be generally useful. That's really what the bug is about. I intend to close it when something like this is implemented. > I don't have time right now, or I'd > offer to write it. Is this the offical Debian slogan?? Guy
