[IAEP] [sugar] Sugar on Edubuntu

Jonas Smedegaard dr at jones.dk
Fri Nov 7 11:37:30 EST 2008


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On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 10:54:38PM +1100, Costello, Rob R wrote:
>From outside this all looks as though it might suffer from being a 
>little too pedantic in adhering to definitional terms

>It feels as free and open as can be, in terms of what you can see and 
>change and modify

Please note that the reason for eToys being kept out of debian "main" is 
*not* that it is considered non-free.

Debian maintains more than 20.000 packages, and eToys as so far been 
judged too "odd" for Debian to maintain, eg. for patching in case of 
security issues.

Yes, I know that upstream developers of eToys, as most upstream 
developers of large projects, will find it unnecessary for Debian to 
take such responsibility in the first place. That Debian can simply rely 
on upstream to handle bug-fixing including security issues.

But Debian wants the ability to handle it on their own. With the help 
from upstream as needd, but fundamentally have the ability to e.g 
consider something worthy of fixing that upstream perhaps do not find 
relevant to fix.


So all in all, I do understand how it can be seen as pedantic from the 
outside. But really I find the judgement of the ftpmasters reasonable.

I believe the way forward with this issue is _not_ to convince Debian
ftpmasters that all is well as is and they simply need to let eToys into 
Debian main, but rather to help them understand how to supervise eToys 
code. How to "flatten" to code to be able to produce a diff, so that 
changes can be inspected non-visually, for example.

No - please don't take such discussion here - I do not consider myself a 
good representative for the Debian ftpmasters' point of view. I simply 
wanted to try enlighten you on how that view might actually be sane, 
just from a different perspective than yours :-)


Kind regards,

  - Jonas

Debian developer

- -- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist og Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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