[gNewSense-users] Re: Wikipedia

[Yavor Doganov]

Matthew Flaschen wrote:
> > Really?  If you are maintaining a program that is part of the GNU
> > Project, would you feel comfortable seeing it in Debian crippled?
> 
> Can you give examples of this type of crippling?

Start with the Holy package, emacs{21,-snapshot,22}.  Then autoconf
(autoconf-nonfree), automake, make, texinfo (texinfo-nonfree-dfsg) and
lots and lots of stuff that I experience significant pain even
reminding about.  GCC.  Every GNU package that has a non-trivial
documentation should have the FSF Front-Cover and Back-Cover Texts,
and this as per the last Debian GR about the FDL is non-free
documentation (actually, "software" for them).  So even if there are
still uncrippled packages, they are certainly going to be maimed.

The propagation of these packages, in this humiliating
form/description, in a system like gNewSense, is unacceptable.

> Ubuntu doesn't modify most debian packages at all.  As for an
> "unknown period", that's a (serious) fault of gNewSense, not Ubuntu.

Ubuntu certainly modify some of the packages.  Most of the packages
are included w/o modifications, I agree.  For example, the versions of
the packgas that I'm interested in do not exist neither in Ubuntu nor
in Debian (with some exceptions for the latter).  

Do I understand you correctly that I should recognize this as a
"normal thing" and eventually contribute my packages to Debian, hoping
that I'll use them in gNewSense when the time comes?  Sorry, but
that's the part I feel it's insulting.