[Pkg-electronics-devel] Hello from a new member and RFS: arduino

[Wesley J. Landaker]

On Saturday 08 May 2010 12:08:36 Scott Howard wrote:
> On a seperate note, what is the team's policy on non-free archives?
> I'm currently maintaining eagle (non-free). I wouldn't mind putting
> eagle under the team's maintenance and helping with that and other
> packages. Once the arduino package is working smoothly I can do the
> same with arduino. I understand that the team maintains PCB, which is
> free, and might not want to split resources with a similar non-free
> package.

I don't think we have any specific policy. Anyone else want to chime in?

Mostly the way we've been working is just that people work mostly on the 
packages that are interesting to them, and others only if there is a pressing 
issue. So I don't think having a contrib or non-free package under team 
maintenance is a resource problem -- people who are uninterested just won't 
work on it, those who are, will.

That said, there may be some political reason(s) that we don't want to team 
maintain non-free packages, e.g. because we are using the "Debian" name as 
part of our team, etc. Or perhaps there are rules antagonistic to development 
non-free projects using alioth resources (mailing lists, git, etc) -- I 
haven't checked.

The above are just examples. I *personally* prefer free software both 
ideologically and technically, but I'm not against helping to package useful 
non-free software where its overridingly pragmatic. I think this is the 
general sentiment of Debian, and why the non-free section exists in the first 
place.