[Nix-dev] Re: Separating Free/non-free package

[Marc Weber]

Hi Ludo,

Excerpts from ludo's message of Sat Sep 19 20:48:39 +0200 2009:
> Of course, that’s the first solution I had in mind, but then I thought
> it wouldn’t work for the following reasons:
> 
>   * Some of us currently don’t care about ‘meta.license’, or don’t want
>     to take the time to define it.
> 
>   * Sometimes ‘meta.license’ is inaccurate or non-informative (e.g.,
>     “license = "free"”).
You're right. Very often I just look at COPYING or look what
sourceforge or gentoo ebuilds say.
 
>   * I don’t think Nixpkgs as a project would adopt a policy saying that
>     packages aren’t committed unless they have undergone licensing
>     review leading to an accurate ‘meta.license’ attribute (which is a
>     consequence of the points above.)

Thanks. That's the key point. And you're probably right.
But I don't think that a separate file will solve these issues.

So basically you're asking for

meta = {
  license = { reviewed = true; value = "GPL"; }; # .. bad if you copy paste. You can forget to change this
}

And that's it.
If comitters don't want to take time they just use the old style and
we're done ?

Another way (never do copy/paste errors): Add a file which contains the
reviewed packages so that a packages is unreviewed unless explicit
action is taken or such..

So maybe we should change the topic and find a solution for this
question ? Do I hit the point rephrasing the issue this way:

Which is the best way to mark packages as free while indicating that
this marking has has been done thoroughly (whatever this means)


>   1. Use a separate file for free software, which is known to be
>      4-freedom-free because it’s been audited.

No matter how this ends. I'll vote for an additional file named
"unclassified" or such where you can commit & share packages easily.
In any case we need something which is like overlays in gentoo.
A place to put unstable packages which may have inaccurate license
information or such.

> I’d prefer (1) because it makes it easier to share work among us.
So is this statement to be seen in contrast to 2) only which was
"separate branch"?

I mean keeping as is (only adding some kind of special marker to the
license) will have the same benefits over 2).
So can you compare (1) with something like I've proposed above?

Note: Implementation can be different. This is just a general way
improving license information while preserving current file layout.

Marc Weber