[arch-dev-public] Definition of non-free for repo-reorg

[Aaron Griffin]

On 7/12/07, Paul Mattal <paul at mattal.com> wrote:
> Jürgen Hötzel wrote:
> > 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.