Comment 4 for bug 25544

Message-Id: <email address hidden>
Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 11:16:19 -0500
From: Peter S Galbraith <email address hidden>
To: Sven Joachim <email address hidden>, <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: Bug#338333: emacs-goodies-el: Some Lisp packages are useless without non-free software

Sven Joachim <email address hidden> wrote:

> Package: emacs-goodies-el
> Version: 26.3-1
> Severity: serious
>
> It seems to me that some Emacs Lisp packages in emacs-goodies-el are
> only of any use if non-free software is installed on the system,
> namely: maplev.el needs Maple, matlab.el needs Matlab and tcl.el needs
> the Target Language Compiler (whatever that is, but it is certainly
> not part of Debian). Therefore, these files belong in the "contrib"
> section of Debian (see section 2.2.2 of the Policy Manual) and must
> not go into a package in the main section. Please remove them from
> emacs-goodies-el and make a separate package of them for the contrib
> section.

I disagree with this interpretation. I certainly didn't think of it
that way when I packaged them.

While matlab and maple are certainly non-free software, the elisp files
don't support these software directly. The elisp files are to help
write scripts which can be under any license, including free ones.
I don't even have matlab in my system but can read .m files more easily
with matlab-mode.

If you still disagree, I guess we can ask debian-devel or debian-policy.

Regards,
--
Peter S. Galbraith, Debian Developer <email address hidden>
                                 http://people.debian.org/~psg
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