Re: OT to Debian [Was: RFC/ITP: Constitution of Finland]
On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 20, 2000 at 10:05:57PM +0200, Josip Rodin wrote:
> > The FTP admins must investigate any new package that tries to enter the
> > archive, I'm sure they'll stop anything insane from going in.
>
> The problem is that the definition of "insane" varies between people.
> When I have the ftp-master hat on, I try very hard not to be a censor.
> In the absence of clear policies on this matter I'd probably accept any
> package that is formally correct and does not look like an obvious joke.
To make a possibly interesting example: On
http://www.physik.uni-halle.de/~e2od5/island/index_eng.html
I collected a set of (hopefully) nice photos of Iceland. I could tell
certain reasons why I would like to include them into Debian:
1) Demonstrates the power of Debian tools which are used exclusive
to produce the images especially the clickable map at
http://www.physik.uni-halle.de/~e2od5/island/clickmap/iceland_vs.html
using the package paul or the presentation on
http://www.physik.uni-halle.de/~e2od5/island/pcd_1998
using pcd2html which is calling imagemagick.
2) I tried to be educational on these pages.
3) They are hopefully nice and provides as much fun as some fortunes
4) They are of public interest as http-access showes (more than one per
day).
Come on people I wouldn't have got this idea without this discussion
and it makes not sense to mirror each more or less boring http-site.
This is not the intention of Debian in my opinion and I hope ftp-admins
would select out such atempts like the one described above.
But I repeat that in my opinion open projects in the public interest
like gutenberg are worth the effort because they provide a knowledge
base which could add value for those people who have to buy CD (ore other
future media) - sets. Perhaps even the fact that it makes such projects
more popular (and backwards if Debian gets more popularity because the
projects include Debian in their recommendation list) would be an
argument. And it *is* computer related as for instance fortune inside
Debian because for instance I used a fair amount from gutenberg to
get a German fortune database (and I would have used much more if I had
a CD set at home and wouldn't have to use resources of our institute
to grab the beast from the internet - and yes, I know that I could order
such a set, but I'd prefer Debian packages).
So id there is a volunteer for such things I wouldn't refuse it
but I don't think there is anybody ... Just to give a positive example
in contrast to the one above.
In my opinion a collection of free data could be useful in the sense
of just to tell people what kind of free data are available. May be
it should be separated from the Debian project but using the Debian
mechanism of dpkg, bug-system, organisation, ... would increase the
quality very much. (To close the circle to the example: in the Debian
sense my photos are non-free because they come without any license. This
would easyly sort out many useless things of this field.)
Kind regards
Andreas.
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