On Friday 22 February 2008 19:36:38 Travis Willard wrote:

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Xavi Soler wrote:

...

My intention is to know the number of non-free packages installed on my system. In Debian I can use 'vrms' [1]. I think Arch has nothing similar, but I can start programming an application like 'vrms' (maybe using libalpm or calling pacman directly).

My first test has been typing:

$ pacman -Q | pacman -Qi | less

and reading carefully the license fields: most (BSDs and MITs specially) say 'custom'. The big problem I've found is that, quite often, I read the word 'none' there, but I can't understant how can it happen in packages stored in official repos. There are a lot of packages without license field.

I could do a heavy research to know which packages include a license field and which don't, and then warn their mantainers. But it would be a waste of time.

A waste of time we've already done. We know which packages don't have licenses - we even have a huge todo list of them. We'll get to them at some point.

I was talking about packages that have a known license but it is not in the PKGBUILD. For example, acpi is a GPL program in [extra] which don't have a licence field in its PKGBUILD. -- Blog: http://interrupciones.net

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Xavi Soler wrote:

On Friday 22 February 2008 19:36:38 Travis Willard wrote:

...

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 11:50 AM, Xavi Soler wrote:

...

My intention is to know the number of non-free packages installed on my system. In Debian I can use 'vrms' [1]. I think Arch has nothing similar, but I can start programming an application like 'vrms' (maybe using libalpm or calling pacman directly).

My first test has been typing:

$ pacman -Q | pacman -Qi | less

and reading carefully the license fields: most (BSDs and MITs specially) say 'custom'. The big problem I've found is that, quite often, I read the word 'none' there, but I can't understant how can it happen in packages stored in official repos. There are a lot of packages without license field.

I could do a heavy research to know which packages include a license field and which don't, and then warn their mantainers. But it would be a waste of time.

A waste of time we've already done. We know which packages don't have licenses - we even have a huge todo list of them. We'll get to them at some point.

I was talking about packages that have a known license but it is not in the PKGBUILD. For example, acpi is a GPL program in [extra] which don't have a licence field in its PKGBUILD.

Yes. We are aware. The simple fact is that there are lots of things to change, and all of us are busy. Considering that it is VERY low priority, no one has got to it. You are more than welcome to submit a patch that does this if you think it can be done faster.

On 26/02/2008, waldek wrote:

Aaron Griffin wrote:

...

Yes. We are aware. The simple fact is that there are lots of things to change, and all of us are busy. Considering that it is VERY low priority, no one has got to it.

You are more than welcome to submit a patch that does this if you think it can be done faster.

maybe you do it already, but just in case you don't, if you don't have time for tasks a "monkey" could do, maybe you could advertise it somewhere and I am sure there would be people willing to help. Since you're the Boss - delegate ;-)

I think one of the issues with licensing is not the actual "doing it" but the fact that it would entail a new release of the package and they don't want to force everyone to download the packages just for a minor change in the PKGBUILD. The idea is that whenever a new version of a package is released, the license field should be updated as well. Slowly with rolling release, we'll end up with all packages having licenses. Dusty