Re: Let's CENSOR it! (was: Uploaded anarchism 7.5-1 (source all) to master)

[Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@ull.es>]

On Thu, Mar 18, 1999 at 03:06:40AM -0600, David Welton wrote:
> > If we ban this document, I must insist that we ban bible-kjv (and
> > probably several other packages) as well.
> 
> I don't particularly think having the bible be part of Debian is all
> that great, but I suppose that one could make the argument that it is
> an important enough document in our culture (at least those of us in
> 'western' countries), that it could be considered a reference...

Let's face it from another POV.
Our distribution is really big (and growing exponentially).
We are making it too hard for our distributors (mirror sites and CD
makers) to distribute the whole thing. We are also making it harder to
our users to find the needle they are searching in our big "packagestack".
We should be developing ways to help FTP mirror sites administrators and CD
makers to carry partial "specialized" mirrors, excluding some sections
without breaking the whole thing.

One step in that direction would be to create some rules for "extra" 
sections. Let's take electronic texts as an example for such an "extra"
section:

- We create an "etexts" section.
- text-only (or mostly-text) packages, not related to any program on the
  distribution (that means I'm not talking about glibc-doc here...)
  should go there.
- "program" packages related to those text-only packages should go into
  "etexts" too (that means as bible-kjv-text go there, bible-kjv go there
  too).
- No package from outside the "etexts" section should depend|recommend a
  package on the "etexts" section (sort of the way a "main" package
  shouldn't depend|recommend on a "contrib" package).

That way anyone can create a "partial" Debian mirror just excluding the
"etexts" section, without breaking dependencies on other sections.

That rules may be applied to other sections as well (off the top of my
head: math, electronics, hamradio, ...).


PS: (This idea, or a very similar one, was proposed by Fabrizio Polacco a
long time ago).
--
Enrique Zanardi					   ezanardi@ull.es