increase apt flexibility (for third party apps)

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2005 at 08:59:28PM +0100, Mike Hearn wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Oct 2005 09:39:05 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > The fact that binaries continue to work doesn't help much: it's still a
> > necessity that everything in the distribution build correctly from source.
> 
> Well, if there had been binaries of njamd available it would have helped
> _me_ when I wanted to use it, the fact that Debian requires that source
> code builds [with the current compiler] is more an artifact of policy than
> anything else. For instance, it's common on Windows or MacOS X to use
> software that you cannot yourself build.

Software which the user cannot build is one thing, but software which
the distributor cannot build is unacceptable; such software cannot be
updated to fix security vulnerabilities and should be either fixed or
removed sooner rather than later.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]