On Thu, July 12, 2007 20:17, Damir Perisa wrote:

Thursday 12 July 2007, Simo Leone wrote: | I still don't see the need. We've never bothered in the past and | it's just making things more complicated, why bother now?

i agree

why making all this mess?

to satisfy the fundamentalists, i would suggest, that you can specify in pacman.conf, what licences you agree to and what licences you do not agree to. then pacman will know what is "allowed" to be installed. whenever a new licence comes up (with a new pkg) pacman would ask: do you agree to licence XYZ? licence XYZ can be found under /path/to/licence if you want to read it. Y/N? and then pacman would add this result to pacman.conf

do not separate repositories acording to licences... that would make it quite messy.

agreed. it'd make a mess when things depend on "non-free" stuff.

On 7/12/07, Paul Mattal wrote:

Damir Perisa wrote:

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Thursday 12 July 2007, Simo Leone wrote: | I still don't see the need. We've never bothered in the past and | it's just making things more complicated, why bother now?

i agree

why making all this mess?

to satisfy the fundamentalists, i would suggest, that you can specify in pacman.conf, what licences you agree to and what licences you do not agree to. then pacman will know what is "allowed" to be installed. whenever a new licence comes up (with a new pkg) pacman would ask: do you agree to licence XYZ? licence XYZ can be found under /path/to/licence if you want to read it. Y/N? and then pacman would add this result to pacman.conf

You know, you're brilliant, man.

Yes, this is clearly the place to do this, in my opinion.

Hmmm http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/6510

On 7/12/07, Paul Mattal wrote:

Aaron Griffin wrote:

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On 7/12/07, Paul Mattal wrote:

...

Damir Perisa wrote:

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Thursday 12 July 2007, Simo Leone wrote: | I still don't see the need. We've never bothered in the past and | it's just making things more complicated, why bother now?

i agree

why making all this mess?

to satisfy the fundamentalists, i would suggest, that you can specify in pacman.conf, what licences you agree to and what licences you do not agree to. then pacman will know what is "allowed" to be installed. whenever a new licence comes up (with a new pkg) pacman would ask: do you agree to licence XYZ? licence XYZ can be found under /path/to/licence if you want to read it. Y/N? and then pacman would add this result to pacman.conf You know, you're brilliant, man.

Yes, this is clearly the place to do this, in my opinion.

Hmmm http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/6510

Okay, so you're brilliant, too. :)

Seriously though, this gives a good way to handle the licensing without burdening the package organization. Good separation.

Except that...I thought the issue had nothing to do with package installation. It has to do with distribution, no? These are two separate issues for sure, and now we have managed to make this much more complicated by bringing pacman into it. -Dan

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 12:17:08PM +0200, Damir Perisa wrote:

Thursday 12 July 2007, Simo Leone wrote: | I still don't see the need. We've never bothered in the past and | it's just making things more complicated, why bother now?

i agree

why making all this mess?

to satisfy the fundamentalists, i would suggest, that you can specify in pacman.conf, what licences you agree to and what licences you do not agree to. then pacman will know what is "allowed" to be installed. whenever a new licence comes up (with a new pkg) pacman would ask: do you agree to licence XYZ? licence XYZ can be found under /path/to/licence if you want to read it. Y/N? and then pacman would add this result to pacman.conf

Featuritis. Another pacman feature, that should not be part of a simple lightweight package manager. A user can query the database for non-free software and just remove it. He has all the tools to do this. Please don't loose track of archlinux/pacman's philosophy. Jürgen

On 7/12/07, Paul Mattal wrote:

Jürgen Hötzel wrote:

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Featuritis. Another pacman feature, that should not be part of a simple lightweight package manager.

License issues do need to be handled somewhere. I think we've already chosen to handle them in pacman, by putting all that information into packages.

We could separate this out into a separate binary that uses libalpm and acts as a wrapper around real pacman, I suppose, if that would make people feel better. That seems to me like even more complexity for a fairly lightweight feature.

I have to agree with Paul here. I mean, if you want to play the featuritis game, I could go on and on about packaging - for instance, why don't we build binary packages with all DB info for that package already in the var/lib/pacman directory? That way we don't even need pacman, just untar it at the top level. That'd strip pacman code in half, who needs this "feature creep" of actually installing packages? If you didn't catch it, the above is me being snarky. I see too many people call "feature creep" on things which, really, aren't that complicated. Seriously, adding the license stuff into pacman would be FAR less code than say, colored output, which apparently everyone wants and no one is concerned about.

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 12:43:48PM -0400, Paul Mattal wrote:

Jürgen Hötzel wrote:

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Featuritis. Another pacman feature, that should not be part of a simple lightweight package manager.

License issues do need to be handled somewhere. I think we've already chosen to handle them in pacman, by putting all that information into packages.

Having license meta-information in packages is fine. And it would also be fine to not only search for package description/name but also package license. This would allow users to search for all pdf packages distributed under GPL using "pacman -Ss" But who needs a child proof for free software devotees, like in this scenario: "I have to install a viewer for this proprietary PDF files. Lets try Adobes Acrobat Reader" # pacman -S acroread do :: you agree to accept Adobes Non Free Software License [Y/N] User: "WTF! Adobe did not release Adobes Acrobat Reader as GPL? Thank god pacman saved me from installing non-free software". Jürgen

Sadly, there are people out there who really do think like this. They're like RMS fan boys and will only install software that is GPL or BSD licensed.

Not sure why you seem to be speaking derogatorily about people who have strong feelings about which software they choose to use.

I think people are more afraid of pulling in non-free dependencies though. Some people are really anal that way.

Again. Why the derogatory edge?

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 02:18:22PM -0700, Jason Chu wrote:

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 02:09:59PM -0700, eliott wrote:

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Sadly, there are people out there who really do think like this. They're like RMS fan boys and will only install software that is GPL or BSD licensed.

Not sure why you seem to be speaking derogatorily about people who have strong feelings about which software they choose to use.

I suppose I didn't have to have an edge. I just disagree with the sentiment.

To whom shall I apologize?

I think you have to pray to RMS three times a day and send him a rainbow colored gnu/pony. That should do for an apology. -S

On Thu, 2007-07-12 at 14:05 -0700, Jason Chu wrote:

Sadly, there are people out there who really do think like this. They're like RMS fan boys and will only install software that is GPL or BSD licensed.

I think people are more afraid of pulling in non-free dependencies though. Some people are really anal that way.

I refuse to support any software that doesn't come with source. Why? you would ask... Everytime we get bugreports about crashing X servers or locking kernels, it's those damn nvidia or ati modules which are non-free. Nvidia and ATI don't seem to do anything about it, the only option you have is to up or downgrade packages. We can't debug it, but we get the bugreports. It's not the first time an xorg release was pushed back because of these shitty modules (Xorg 7.1, anyone? it happens with xorg-server 1.3.0 again now) Then another thing. Some things have distribution restrictions. We're telling all the time that we can't ship it on DVD, but did you think about exporting it from FTP? That's also distributing, we're not called a linux DISTRIBUTION for nothing. These packages shouldn't even be in the repos. Then there's "ask permission for distribution" packages. So we ask permission, we get it with a bunch of exceptions, then someone forks arch, or starts a port to another architecture (archppc). We made a distribution deal, but the people who fork don't have permission to do so. Then there's also (un)official mirrors, does the distribution agreement validate on their mirror? Then we have the part where free packages can depend on non-free packages. Mplayer and xine depending on codecs, which is a binary blob without source and these DLLs are even illegal in many countries (the DLLs come from several commercial codecs without distribution license, and if they have, the license says we're not allowed to modify... guess what, these DLLs are modified to run on linux). So people who don't want these illegal codecs have to pacman -Rd it everytime and hope mplayer and xine don't break because they miss codecs that were there on compilation time. IMHO we should do something about the handling of non-free software in our distribution. If we keep doing things this way, sooner or later we'll run into legal problems.