Re: [GNU-linux-libre] Adding some scummvm game(s) to the "List of software that does not respect the Free System Distribution Guidelines".

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Wed, 7 Jun 2023 13:21:19 -0400
bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> wrote:

> its a good point - in this case, there is the pragmatic concern, that
> it is extremely unlikely that anyone wants to write a new game for
> scrumvm - for example, if there were no games for it at all, arch
> would most likely drop that package (or would never have added it in
> the first place), and we would not be discussing it
FSDG compliant distributions are free to package or not package what
they want as long as they respect the FSDG criteria. So I don't see why
FSDG distributions cannot package a software if upstream doesn't.

The FSDG distributions can also have different goals and justifications
for packaging specific software than the upstream distributions they
are based on.

The h-client program (a program for interacting with h-node) is not
packaged by Arch Linux but it's packaged by Parabola. Trisquel is
also open to accepting packages like that too. In contrast PureOS would
probably require people to add h-client to Debian to get it.

Some distributions like Parabola or Trisquel also do deviate from what
the upstream distributions do in various ways (like Parabola supports 3
architectures in the same distribution, I also vaguely remember
that Trisquel re-added specific installers not supported anymore by
Ubuntu, etc).

And in all these cases it's up to the distribution to choose what to do
as long as they stay compliant with the FSDG. 

And often the choices that don't follow upstream are either self-evident
or well explained in blog posts / release notes for instance, so I don't
see any issue with that.

Denis.

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