Branden said: >Yes. So? It looks like the non-free section is getting larger and >larger, and more deserving of a team of shepherds that can take proper >care of it. It is, however, not in Debian's charter to do so.
Yeah, it 'looks like'. To you. To people who look at the percentages, it doesn't look that way. But let's look at the raw numbers. bo->hamm: Non-free increases by 112 packages hamm->slink: Non-free increases by 71 packages slink->potato: Non-free decreases by 5 packages potato->woody: Non-free decreases by 21 packages woody->sarge (testing): Non-free increases by 20 packages sarge (testing)->sid: Non-free increases by 15 packages About 8 packages in non-free are in the process of being removed entirely from both testing and unstable. After this happens, the difference in the number of non-free packages between slink and sid will be +1. Non-free *was* increasing a lot in the past. Then it started decreasing. Very recently it appears to have started increasing again, but it's not actually fair to compare 'testing' and 'unstable' to actual releases, as they (both) will generally have more packages. --- It's worth noting that an awful lot of people have been reinventing the wheel by creating 'downloader' packages in main or contrib whose sole purpose is to download, build, and install some 'non-free' package. (I would argue that such packages belong in contrib.) If non-free is dropped, every popular package will probably be replaced with one of these.... and the distinction between free and non-free will be even less clear. However, it might actually be simpler for non-free supporters this way. Suppose I wrote a really slick package called "deb-non-free" for "downloader" packages to depend on. An individual downloader package would simply include * the site to download the orig.tar.gz from * the diff and other information to make a .deb file with It would invoke a script in "deb-non-free" which would download, build, and install the appropriate .deb. Then downloader packages would be trivial to write rather than just easy! Non-free packages would have automatic installers in contrib! Downloaders would arrive in testing automatically, because they'd be so simple they'd never have bugs! Is this considered better by those who want to remove non-free? --Nathanael
