Re: Intent to package GNU Philosophy web pages
On 24-May-99, 22:06 (CDT), Ron <ron@microtronics.com.au> wrote:
> > There are other reasons that free software is good (e.g. the ESR
> > utilitarian arguments). Some Debianers might agree with one philosophy,
> > others another.
>
>
> um.. Debian GNU/Linux
> ^^^
> I'd say that's reason enough for us to include them. Though of course
> you *are* free to dissent in a constitutional anarchy ;-)
The name is a politeness and respect issue. The philosophy/incentive for
free software is something else.
For FWIW, while agreeing that ESR has codified a lot of reasons why free
software can be better than non-free software, I'm pretty much with RMS
when it comes to why free software is a Good Thing(tm).
None-the-less, I don't think this kind of stuff belongs in the main
Debian distribution. We need to create a data/doc area for these items.
When I suggested that it become part of the "standard" Debian doc
package (whichever package contains the SC and DFSG, if there is one), I
was expecting a size of 5K-20K, based on the core documents. I now see
that it is pushing 1M, which seems, to me, excessive. What is the point
of packaging up an entire website, which will be out-of-date next week?
Obviously, a person can package whatever zie wants, and offer it to
Debian (subject to copyright/licensing/etc.) But we need to be at
least *aware* of what we are doing to the people who create/distribute
Debian CDs. We're already up to three CDs (right?). Adding arbitrary
documents, websites and datasets makes that bigger, makes it harder to
maintain a mirror, makes it harder to distribute, and scores fairly low
in the "value added" area (compare the difference between the binary and
source packages for something like Apache, and something like the GNU
philosophy package.)
Having said that, and thought about the packages I maintain, 'jargon'
clearly fits in the above category, and will be withdrawn until there is
an appropriate archive.
Steve
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