Re: [Health] Installing GNU Health on Trisquel 8

[Axel Braun]

Dear Ricardo,

thank you for investigating on this.

> Gesendet: Montag, 01. Juli 2019 um 21:57 Uhr
> Von: "Ricardo Morte Ferrer" <address@hidden>
> An: "General GNU Health discussion and help" <address@hidden>
> Betreff: [Health] Installing GNU Health on Trisquel 8
>
> Dear all,
>
> here I send you the asnwer from the Trisquel forum, so that we can find
> the better way to install GNU Health on Trisquel 8:
>
> The problem is that including pip would violate the GNU Free System
> Distribution Guidelines,[1] which state:
>
> "A free system distribution must not steer users towards obtaining any
> nonfree information for practical use, or encourage them to do so. The
> system should have no repositories for nonfree software and no specific
> recipes for installation of particular nonfree programs. Nor should the
> distribution refer to third-party repositories that are not committed to
> only including free software"

Hmmmm....my *very personal* opinion:
With the same argument you could prohibit the sale of knifes, as you could not 
only cut tomatoes with it, but as well kill someone.

It clearly patronizes the user and restricts his #FreedomOfChoice

> > "I guess you can always install it. All the python packages that GNU
> > Health uses are Libre, so no worries on that.
>
> Installing it should be easy. Packages in the PyPi repository use
> setuptools, so they are not hard to build. After verifying that a PyPi
> package and all of its dependencies are free, you can install it
> manually. See my comment here[2] and onpon4's correction.

So if you want to package GNU Health for Trisquel, you may want to check the 
Debian packages as starting point.

> > PS: You should talk to the Trisquel team, and ask them to include pip.The
> > argument of not including pip because there might be some non-free
> > software on pypi, IMHO, is way restrictive".
>
> It is inaccurate to say that "there *might* be some non-free software on
> pypi," because we know for a fact that there is non-free software on
> PyPi.[3]

It is good if we have a common ground for all to start from, but it is a bad 
idea (and bad practice in politics) to predefine or force results. This is what 
I see here as well.

Good luck
Axel