The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: binary packages?

[ Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list. ]

> quinlan >And putting Syslinux into contrib is not a good idea.  It should be
> quinlan >okay to include binaries from "trusted sources" if they can't be
> quinlan >easily compiled by the Debian maintainer.

It's not a good idea to have the distribution depend on something
that we can't fix, if and when necessary. Syslinux is way too
critical, I think.

Christoph Lameter:
> Syslinux is a base package so it cannot go into contrib. The policy might
> need a change.

I think we'd better work on getting it to compile from within Debian.
Or switching to some other tool.

> Generally we should have some kind of policy regarding binary packages
> because now as Linux is going mainstream there will certainly be more
> packages that are commercial or have some sort of "free" status that are
> distributed binary only.

I'm happy with the current policy: binary-only goes into contrib or
non-free.

> - Packages that are binary only but freely redistributable (like PASH
>   until sources become available)

Contrib.

> - Packages that are binary but NOT freely redistributable.
>   Only the diffs are distributable. These packages can be handled by
>   "alien". Do these diffs go into the distribution or where are
>   they going? How are they uploaded / submitted?

Non-free.

> - Packages that are binary and freely redistributable when not modified
>   Those will have an .orig.tar.gz and a diff.gz but no
>   *.deb. The .deb must be generated on the fly by the alien command.

For most of these, adding debian/* does not count as a modification,
I think. Anyway, it's non-free either way.

> - Through ibcs and dosemu even packages for a variety of Unixes and DOS
>   apps could be packaged for Debian. Any ideas about that?

If they're commercial, non-free. If they're binary-only freeware, contrib.

> Perhaps some day Linux will take over the world?

Hopefully not.

> That reminds me: FreeDOS is also a binary only package not compilable
> under Debian. Should it be moved to contrib?

Yes.

(I see I'm beginning to sound very authoritative. Sorry. I'm not. I'm
just a Debian developer among a many others, which is fine with me.)

-- 
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Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.

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