Re: Guix and FSDG

[Raghav Gururajan]

Hello David!

> I believe this is incorrect and I will explain why.  This exact
> circumstance was brought up in the early days of the Guix project
> when
> FSDG compliance was a big topic of discussion because Ludovic and RMS
> were making sure that Guix conformed to it.  It is true that Guix
> will
> download source archives for packages that *may* contain files with a
> nonfree license.  However, Guix has a special mechanism developed
> specifically to deal with this issue.  In Guix, the <origin> data
> type
> is used to store information about a package's source code.  In this
> data structure there is a field called "snippet" which may contain a
> custom procedure written by the person that wrote the package.  The
> role of the snippet procedure is to *remove* any files in the source
> archive that are not freely licensed.  The result is a new source
> archive that contains only freely licensed files.  The most important
> part of this process is that the original source archive is *never*
> accessible to the Guix user via any Guix tools.  The original archive
> is discarded and does not end up in the canonical location for Guix
> data: /gnu/store.  Thus, running `guix build --source
> problematic-package` will only ever return the cleaned archive, never
> the original with nonfree files.  Therefore, Guix has taken
> sufficient
> technical measures to avoid steering its user towards nonfree
> software
> and thus Guix is compliant with the FSDG.

I completely agree with you. The way you explained, does show that Guix
comply with FSDG. The thing is, the semantics used in current version
of FSDG does not explain things well. That's why I pointed out that
FSDG require revision, such that this new scenario is included in FSDG.
So that Guix or any future distros that gonna use same/similar
mechanism, does not pose confusion to readers of FSDG. That is all. :-)

Thank you!

Regards,
RG.

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