[IAEP] Sugar on Debian

[Jonas Smedegaard]

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On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 08:37:13PM -0800, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>At Sat, 8 Nov 2008 04:26:55 +0100,
>Jonas Smedegaard wrote:

>> On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 04:12:13PM -0800, Yoshiki Ohshima wrote:
>> >At Fri, 7 Nov 2008 19:45:00 +0100,
>> >Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>> >> 
>> >> The Squeak image "Etoys" (the only one currently packaged 
>> >> officially for Debian) is in "non-free" due to ftpmasters judging 
>> >> it not possible for the security team to maintain throughout the 
>> >> (multiple year long) lifespan of a Debian release.
>> >
>> >  Is there anywhere I can read about their reasoning behind this 
>> >judgement?  Holger mentions "it's because the impossibility to 
>> >bootstrap etoys." but what exactly does that mean?
>> 
>> That looks like a quote from a post by Holger in this thread. I 
>> believe he describes his judgement of current status better in his 
>> summary included with the Debian packaging of Etoys, that I quoted 
>> earlier in same thread:
>> 
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-November/002340.html
>> 
>> 
>> >  We had a similar discussion that covered the "security" aspect 
>> >(http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2008-June/015568.html and 
>> >emails around it).  Can I see anywhere the responses to these from 
>> >the Debian ftpmasters?
>> 
>> It seems those discussions took place privately between José, Holger, 
>> Bert and the ftpmasters. I have only ever seen the final decision 
>> forwarded by Bert to the IAEP list:
>> 
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2008-May/000699.html
>
>  Right, the "final decision" looked like some misunderstanding
>involved.  After this, more discussion took place:
>
>http://lists.lo-res.org/pipermail/its.an.education.project/2008-June/thread.html
>
>so I was wondering if there was some more updates based on the
>subsequent discussion.

Sorry, I did not realize the importance of your reference to _later_ 
discussion for your question.

Before I posted the above, I searched the public Debian archives and 
found nothing(!) relevant. So I suspect the general Debian community is 
completely unaware of tour hard work on relicensing Squeak, and the 
ftpmasters' decision to anyway judge it as non-free. As I said, it seems 
the discussion took place only discretely between José, Holger, Bert and 
ftpmasters.

I is possible that new discrete discussions with ftpmasters emerged as 
result of (or independent from) the discussions here at IAEP and OLPC 
lists in June.

Jim Gettys and I are Debian developers and followed those threads at 
IAEP and OLPC, but none of us are ftpmasters and I for one did not pass 
it on to other forums.

Holgers published summary and his lack of different viewpoint when 
posting here yesterday, indicates no progress:

Back in May ftpmasters recommended to openly discuss their decision at 
the main Debian developers' mailinglist debian-devel at lists.debian.org 
The words "Squeak" and "Etoys" matched no recent posts to that 
mailinglist. Holger clearly stated in his summary on june 13th that he 
does not intend to start discussing openly until after the release of 
Debian Lenny (which was frozen at some point in the summer and still is 
not ready for release).

I recommend asking the other participants of that dicrete dialogue back 
in may if they know of any progress.

Alternatively the mailinglist debian-devel at lists.debian.org is open for 
all, so you are free to initiate a discussion about the "non-free" 
status of Etoys (as an example, and Squeak images generally), and to 
raise attention to your relicensing work and the seemling lack of 
results. I do not have the mental resources or detailed knowhow on the 
topic to do so myself.


Kind regards,

  - Jonas


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

  [x] quote me freely  [ ] ask before reusing  [ ] keep private
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