[Dev] [RFC] Package freedom requirements clarification

[Luke T. Shumaker]

At Sun, 25 Nov 2012 11:29:46 +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
> 
> It's the same, more explicit.
> 
> > 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`).
> 
> The documentation suggests it being used after the source is extracted,
> while mksource and SRCBUILDs do this to make the source archive used for
> builds.  Does this mean that our source mirrors would provide the
> nonfree files removed in prepare()?

I didn't think about that.  Our source mirrors would mirror the
nonfree files.  (But do we even do source mirrors in most cases?)

I guess the question is:

  Can we download and distribute non-free code, if it is immediately
  deleted at the beginning of the build process?

The only relevent part of FSDG that I could find is:

  A free system distribution must not steer users towards obtaining
  any nonfree information for practical use, or encourage them to do
  so.

So, I think that it is at least ok by FSDG, as the non-free code isn't
being obtained for "practical use".

If we decide that we can't, I will contact the pacman devs and discuss
getting `makepkg --allsource` run `prepare()`.

> > 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.
> 
> True.

Happy hacking,
~ Luke Shumaker