Hi, On Sun, 30 Aug 2015, Johannes Schauer wrote: > Allowing apt to pin (or otherwise filter) packages using debtags, for example, > sounds like a solution that would solve this problem while at the same time > allowing a wide range of other uses as well.
Agreed. While the split looks like an easy way out, we have too many use-cases of non-free that could be interesting to support in some way, and we just saw that they can be orthogonal to the proposed split. So I would suggest that when d-i has to install something from non-free, and that the user accepted, it enables the repository in a way that APT never pulls stuff from it without any explicit confirmation. AFAIK this feature does not exist today in APT but it would certainly be useful... deb [confirm-before-use=yes] http://http.debian.net/debian jessie non-free And before installing a package from there it would ask the user if he really wants to install the package from there and he would be shown the reason why the package is in non-free. Until such a feature is available, we could have a "non-free" package that would provide a filtered view of non-free, the criteria of the filter can be configured with a debconf question. There are probably multiple ways to achieve this, starting by creating a local repository which downloads the selected subset (but it would be better to have a solution that does not require downloading of non-free package before they are actually needed, acting more like a package cache à la approx/apt-cacher). Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer Support Debian LTS: http://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html Learn to master Debian: http://debian-handbook.info/get/
