How Debian handles it [LWN.net]

How Debian handles it

Posted Sep 29, 2008 15:02 UTC (Mon) by Frej (subscriber, #4165)
In reply to: How Debian handles it by dmarti
Parent article: openSUSE and the distribution of proprietary software

I would hardly call 'running vrms' equivalent to 'debian is telling me'

It's more like:
"_Guess_ you need a magic passphrase, and the door will open".

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How Debian handles it

Posted Sep 29, 2008 15:41 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

I am not user of Debian (anymore), but non-free packages are very clearly differentiated not only by (quite opaque, true) vrms, but also by being in the separate branch of repostiroy. Eliminate non-free word from /etc/apt/sources.list and you won't get any of them.

How Debian handles it

Posted Sep 30, 2008 14:19 UTC (Tue) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Indeed, non-free is not even included in a default installation. The user has to go out of his/her way to enable it; a tricky feat given that it's not mentioned in any obviously documented place as far as I can tell!

How Debian handles it

Posted Oct 9, 2008 21:37 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

[...] it's not mentioned in any obviously documented place as far as I can tell!

A number of packages recommend or suggest their documentation (which is good), and then I find that apt-get doesn't know about this package, so I google for, e.g. "debian package make-doc" and there it says "[non-free]" in big letters. And if I actually want to have documentation for pretty important packages, I have to put "non-free" in my sources.list, even if I don't want any software that the real RMS considers non-free. And I am worried that some proprietary software might slip in through this open door. I would appreciate it if Debian did not just throw anything thats not DFSG-compliant into one common "non-free" section. At least now I can check with vrms:

               Non-free packages installed on smaug

emacs21-common-non-dfsg   GNU Emacs shared, architecture independent, non-DFSG i
gawk-doc                  Documentation for GNU awk
gcc-4.1-doc               documentation for the GNU compilers (gcc, gobjc, g++)
gcc-doc-base              several GNU manual pages
glibc-doc-reference       GNU C Library: Documentation
make-doc                  Documentation for the GNU version of the "make" utilit

  6 non-free packages, 0.6% of 1033 installed packages.

Only GNU stuff. Good.