[Dev] [RFC] Package freedom requirements clarification

Luke T. Shumaker lukeshu at sbcglobal.net
Sun Nov 25 05:27:24 GMT 2012


At Sat, 24 Nov 2012 23:11:48 +0100,
Michał Masłowski wrote:
> 0. Do not fetch nonfree sources in PKGBUILDs
> 
> I believe this is needed for FSDG compliance.  This can be implemented
> using SRCBUILDs or similar technologies.  Having patches containing
> whole nontrivial nonfree files in abslibre is IMO also not acceptable.

I'd like to change this to:

 0.1. There should be no nonfree code by the end of `makepkg -o`"
 0.2. Nothing nonfree should be tracked in ABSLibre/PBS

Right now 0.1 means what you have; but the next version of makepkg
offers a `prepare()` function to prepare the sources.  It works exactly
like our `mksource()` (currently deprecated in favor of `SRCBUILD`).

I added 0.2 to mean that there can't be a patch file containing
non-free code.  Which means that we must use `rm` and friends to
remove non-free code; which is fine in most cases.

> 3. Provide sources for all packages
> 
> We have source tarballs for some packages.  Should these sources be
> complete (i.e. so having only abs, all binary packages, the source
> tarball and no network access it is possible to build the binary package
> From exactly the same source)?  I believe that they should, this might
> need VCS packaging standards changes.
> 
> This change would benefit from scripts to use our source repos instead
> of PKGBUILD-specified mirrors (these aren't always online when repo is,
> some URLs have broken while the package needs building on mips64el or is
> available on x86), to check the completeness of the source repo and to
> upload the source when releasing a package.

I think our policy is actually to do that (documented somewhere; not
the contract), but we don't :P

I think that this is something that we should implement using our
tools.  I'm currently working on both libretools and PBS; this is
something I will consider.

Happy hacking,
~ Luke Shumaker



More information about the Dev mailing list