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

[Paul Mattal]

Aaron Griffin wrote:
> 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.

I just want to temper this by saying.. I think we should be wary of 
feature creep. But I don't think this is it, given that we've put 
license management squarely into pacman's domain in the first place.

Regardless, I'm not planning to implement this pacman feature, so I 
can avoid the argument altogether. :)

- P