On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 12:20:27PM -0500, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
F> The explanation is here; python2.0 does not have the right F> license for Debian. Consequence: mailman is currently not F> compatible with debian. F> http://lists.debian.org/debian-python-0102/msg00028.htmlTwo comments, which I'm not directing at the Debian folks because they need to make their own decisions, and because I don't know who at Debian to direct these to.
First, I don't buy the backwards compatibility argument. Yes, some code broke, but it was broken anyway (people using undocumented APIs). The broken code is easily fixed.
You're right and that's not it. For instance bash2 wasn't fully compatible with bash1, but while Red Hat never had the balls to push bash2 as default bash, debian did, even though it broke a few things that were really errors in the user scripts.
The problem is that if the license was categorized as non free according to Debian's free software guidelines, they fork the package so that you can decide to run python from debian main, or python2 from non-free. Had they called python2, python, there would have been no way for a user to keep the 'free' python if he/she had non-free in his/her list of package sources.
This is merely a packaging issue.
Marc
PS: don't flame me about what's free or non free, I know nothing about this specific issue, I'm just explaining what the technical reasons for the package split would be.
Microsoft is to operating systems & security .... .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/ | Finger marc_f@merlins.org for PGP key