[Dev] [Votation] Package freedom guidelines, what to do next

[Michał Masłowski]

>> Not all software that complies with these guidelines should be included
>> in Parabola.  Good reasons for inclusion are the package being included
>> in Arch or being useful for you.
>
> i don't understand the wording, not all the software that complies with
> *our guidelines* should be included? is something wrong with our
> guidelines then? :P

These guidelines don't show what packages are useful for us while this
is a more important criterion when deciding if a free package should be
added.  Maybe this sentence should be removed to make the guidelines
shorter.

>> All blacklist changes are discussed on the
>> dev at lists.parabolagnulinux.org list before being committed.  Unless it's
>> obvious (not only for the original reporter) that the package won't be
>> free, an issue report should be left open for it until the problem is
>> fixed and the package is unblacklisted or it's known that no useful free
>> work can be based on parts of the package.
>
> i think we should include "discuss on gnu-linux-libre" and "contact
> upstream" provisions here too.

We should, with an appropriate ordering.

>> - building packages from sources
>>
>>   I don't want to change this in TeXLive-related packages, they often
>>   just provide binaries and difficult to build sources for
>>   non-arch-specific things.
>
> so the texlive distribution is non reproducible? i think we should
> consider this a bug then... how do other distros build texlive?

TeXLive provides sources for a LaTeX package (.dtx and .ins) and
"binaries" (.sty, made from parts of .dtx with comments stripped; .pdf
made by TeXing .dtx).  Maybe there are scripts to build some such files
From source, I don't know if all do.  There is no reason for a distro to
not use the provided .sty files.  (I read them to learn how the packages
work and how to solve specific problems with my documents, since Arch
and Parabola do not provide the documentation for it.)

>> - rewrite histories of our PKGBUILD repositories to not include nonfree files
>
> rewriting history makes me feel in 1984. i consider all commits previous
> to HEAD as bugs.

The issue is that we ask all contributors to download some files
containing nonfree unrar source code.  This is a problem that I remember
From the Linux-libre git gnu-linux-libre discussion.

We could ignore it unless someone wants and knows how to do it.

>> Blacklist of source packages
>> ============================
>>
>> The aim is to rewrite blacklist.txt to list source packages and have the
>> binary packages to remove automatically found by dbscripts.
>
> db-sync does this automatically with a simple "fetch everything free
> From arch, remove the rest" (that also makes it self-healing, it's been
> more than a year without repo breakages), is there a problem with the
> current approach?

Example PKGBUILD fragment:

pkgbase=a
pkgname=('a-a' 'a-b')

blacklist.txt fragment:

a-a::nonfree pony pictures
a-b::nonfree dragon pictures

Then a is removed from abs, a-a and a-b are removed from repos.  (There
is currently a problem only of firefox-i18n-like packages using many
lines of the blacklist.)

When the next revision adds a-c with nonfree pictures of gnus then we
need to add it to the blacklist.  db-sync could found it knowing that
a-c is provided by the same PKGBUILD as already blacklisted packages.

Even if a-c that is added is free, we should blacklist it since it would
require a PKGBUILD that provides a-a and a-b.

If db-sync found that a-a, a-b and a-c are built from the blacklisted
package a, it could remove them without being explicitly named in the
blacklist.

>> Deprecate rePKGBUILD
>> ====================
>>
>> Remove their mentions from the wiki, remove the scripts from libretools
>> if no one has non-Parabola uses for them.
>
> what's the reason for this?

They would be just an additional work which saves only the time of x86
machines [0].

[0] https://lists.parabolagnulinux.org/pipermail/dev/2012-November/000974.html

>> Check all libre packages for nonfree software in abslibre or sources
>> ====================================================================
>>
>> They already remove it from binary packages, so this should be easy to
>> check.
>
> i don't understand this part

Nearly all issues discussed in this thread (except for nonfree
nonfunctional data) are already fixed in [libre].  The other issues are
related to easy to find parts of PKGBUILDs like applying
p7zip-libre.patch or calls to rm on known nonfree font files in build().

>> Make sources of all packages available
>> ======================================
>>
>> - have a script fetching them with errors posted to the list
>
> there's one such script on dbscripts

Does it fetch the sources from Parabola, or only from Arch?
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