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

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Eelco,

Eelco Dolstra <e.dolstra at tudelft.nl>
writes:

> - A while ago I did some work on a "virtual RMS" for Nix, though I didn't get
> very far.  The idea is that you can say
>
>   $ nix-vrms /etc/nixos/nixos -A system

That sounds cool.  Where can we get it?

> - I'm not so worried that the meta.license field will be incorrect (just
> missing, but that's a matter of policy - we can require it for all new
> packages).

Unfortunately, that there’s been no such policy for years makes
‘meta.license’ essentially unusable.  It’s also been argued that the
recommendations in ‘meta.xml’ are way too vague.  And it appears that,
e.g., Nicolas, would consider “free” in the sense of “gratis”, which
adds to the confusion.

So I’m glad if a policy is instated and actually followed.  However I’m
afraid it’d happen too late and would be foreign to most contributors.
Nixpkgs contributors have been used to “free-style” cooperation, a
custom that’s going to be hard to change IMO (think ‘builderDefs’
vs. ‘stdenv’, ‘pythonNew’ vs. ‘python’, ‘args: with args;’, etc., etc.).

> The solution is to finish the virtual RMS tool and add missing
> meta.license fields :-)

Is VRMS able to analyze SWIG’s license [0]?  Real life is full of
examples like this one.

Thanks,
Ludo’.

[0] http://www.swig.org/Release/LICENSE