Re: [GNU-linux-libre] Recognizing the GNU system as a free distro

[Ludovic Courtès]

Sam Geeraerts <address@hidden> skribis:

> Op Wed, 11 Sep 2013 14:05:35 +0200
> schreef address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès):

[...]

>> The distro obviously contains only free software, and it follows the
>> FSF free system distribution guidelines [2]; it is not based on any
>> existing distribution.  Package contributors perform a license and
>> copyright check on the packages they add.  Package meta-data records
>> the license of each package [3]; we do not keep track of copyright
>> notices on a per-file basis like Debian’s copyright files do.
>
> Note that some packages may contain non-free files (e.g. [a]),
> regardless of the license of the whole. There are also freedom issues
> that are unrelated to the license of the code, e.g. encouraging the use
> of non-free software [b]. I see that your packaging guidelines mention
> these issues, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

Sure.  Our build recipes remove problematic files, and would likewise
patch non-free software recommendations (though the latter hasn’t
occurred yet.)

Guix has one specificity, which is that by default users get pre-built
binaries from hydra.gnu.org, but they can also choose to build things
locally.

In the latter case, as Jason mentions, Guix downloads the source tarball
from upstream, and the actual patching occurs as an early stage of the
build process.

Jason suggests hosting pre-patched source tarballs of problematic
packages, and referring to those rather than to upstream’s.  I’m
reluctant because of the technical and administrative burden it entails:
we’d need an out-of-band mechanism to maintain patches/scripts, said
patches/scripts would have to be reviewed separately, contributors would
need to have the necessary credentials to upload patched tarballs, etc.

(Besides, our package meta-data would probably still refer to the “real”
home page of the package, from which it’s trivial to get the unmodified
tarball.)

What do people think?

Thanks,
Ludo’.