I was wondering lately wether it was sensible to weaken the doctrine of using the build configuration defaults from upstream such that options preventing the package from being made available via FTP are excluded. Without looking any further, gnome and mplayer come to mind, which are certainly popular and are currently not installable from the official binary package repositories. This is often a tough call. One one hand, you have a package that needs ACCETPABLE_LICENSES to build and can't be distributed, but is perhaps fully functional, and on the other a more free or even Free package with reduce functionality. The right fix is for upstream to create a plugin architecture so that we can have a Free base package and a bunch of plugins, and not impair the base because some plugin is non-Free. Failing that, we have to choose. I have some uncommitted changes to change mplayer's defaults towards not including codecs that would cause NO_BIN_ON_FTP to be set. In general I don't think we have a strong doctrine to follow upstream recommendations in such cases. If you have specific suggestions by all means send them in with discussion of why they are striking the right balance as discussed above. I suspect I'm more on the side of omitting features with troublesome licenses by default.
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