Re: The 30 most popular packages missing in Debian

[Thibaut Paumard]

Le 31 janv. 08 à 08:52, Franklin PIAT a écrit :

On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 10:48 +0100, Thibaut Paumard wrote:

Perhaps a possibility would be to have a sort of "module-assistant"-
like package with a database of third-party, non-free software. This
tool would either install the third-party software on demand (like
googleearth-package), or give instructions on how to do it manually.
e.g.:

What would be the benefit of having another set of commands ?
If some common tasks are shared by packages (validate license, get
binary...), couldn't this be shared by a helper program, like debconf
does.

Sure.

Having two sets of commands to install our programs wouldn't be very
user friendly.

third-party-get update

Do you also plan to have another repository ? What would be the benefit

over current non-free ?

Not a repository, a database. Basically just enough information to help installing the software from outside without reproducing it in non-free, in particular when it's (potentially) illegal or dangerous (too high liability) to put it in non-free. Several packages exist that do that: you install the Debian package, and this package provides a tool to download the soft from the internet, make a .deb and install the .deb. That may be just the right thing to do. My idea has the advantage to provide information in cases when you cannot even do that, like you just can't install the software automatically since the user has to go to the website and click "I acknowledge the License". But then, sure, a wiki page can do it just as well, as long as it's reasonably well advertised. That's also the problem with additional repositories like debian- unofficial, debian-multimedia, even backports.org and my own very tiny and personal repo: they're useful only as long as the luser who just wants Skype find them easily (like in, say, "apt-get install skype"). Now literature may not be the way to go, since most non- technical users just don't read the doc.

How to resolve dependencies between free and non-free programs, if both

the tools and repository systems are different ?

These dependencies can go in a single direction: non-free may require free, but free (as in "Debian main") can't depend on non-free.

Also It's important that we can tell our users "Debian 4.0, as of
2008-01-31 has flashplugin-nonfree version X.Y, skype version Z.Y",

That's not true since non-free is not part of the Debian GNU/Linux official distribution (see heading § of Policy, Chapter 2).

and
provide all the QA associated (BTS, security tracking...).

file, and fails if it's not the one expected.
A tool similar to DEHS could be used by the maintainer to proactively
monitor if the file exists, then update the package.

For instance, flashplugin-nonfree verify the checksum of the downloaded

Regards, Thibaut.

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