RPM non free?

[Michael Hipp]

Karsten M. Self (by way of Douglas J Hunley <doug at hunley.homeip.net>) wrote:
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> - From Debian Weekly News:
> 
>     RPM orphaned and not free anymore? Joey Hess [17]orphaned [18]rpm
>     since the newest version depends on the non-free elfutils library.
>     This makes it impossible for Joey to update the package. Not being
>     able to include rpm in Debian could have far reaching consequences -
>     from problems with the LSB to increased difficulty to run other
>     distributions software on Debian and vice-versa.
> 
>      17. http://bugs.debian.org/239518
>      18. http://packages.debian.org/rpm
> 
> RPM support is required by LSB.
> 
> This could be an oversight on the part of Red Hat.  Or it could be a
> strategic move on the part of Red Hat to exclude free distributions
> including Debian and Gentoo, from LSB compliance.

That first link seems to say that it is not RPM, per se, but a 
dependency that is non-free. The author also suggests it can be worked out.

I don't know much about LSB, but it seems odd to me that it should be a 
requirement.

Michael