Henning Makholm wrote:
Scripsit Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au>Henning Makholm wrote:dfsg-freedom-of-all-runnable-programsfree-software-and-firmwaredfsg-freedom-of-all-main-cpu-runnable-programsfree-softwareGiven the historically demonstrated ambiguity of the term "software" I think it would be advisable to leave it out here.
There's some historically demonstrated ambiguity in the term "free" too; we avoid it by defining what it means... But hey, whatever: other short suggestions are good too, I just don't have any.
There's probably also the "free-use" and "nonprofit-use" properties -- can I use this package without having to worry about the license, canI use it at home, or at work as well?Yes. Now we're at it, perhaps there should be "buildd-safe", with an appropriate specification. Or am I wrong when I assume a major reason why non-free is not autobuilt is worries that not all licences in non-free would allow building except by people jumping through particular hoops?
One of the reasons; aiui others include "it's non-free, why bother?" and that non-free stuff doesn't build as cleanly as main, causing more pain.
Hmm. Does apt suppport having a Packages file separate from the pool whose files it refers to?
Yes; cf dists/ and pool/, or think back to when we were first doing pools and had some files in dists/ and some files in pool/.
dak doesn't really support it, but that could be changed or hacked around fairly easily, afaics. No point worrying about it while there aren't even tags for it though.
It would be cool to be able to generate Packages files for one's particular combination of freedoms-I-care-about-personally, and then fetch the files from a general mirror.
For that you'd want to download the Packages file for non-free, then have apt or aptitude/etc filter out the stuff you're not interested in. Which would probably be a useful feature anyway, of course.
It's not likely to be one that'd be acceptable to the FSF-types though; there's a big difference between:
deb http://blah/debian etch main fsf-free and deb http://blah/debian etch main non-freeif you're a free software hacker who just happens to have a different idea of what freedoms are important to Debian's.
That is, list reasons why somebody might want to *accept* the package on his machine (or his redistribution) rather than list reasons why somebody might wanto to *exclude* it.That's kinda kludgy for the "free-software / free-software-and-firmware" tags, afaics.Could you elaborate on that? I don't really get which kludginess you are referring to -
It just feels backwards; count the negatives in "I don't care about non-free firmware" and "I don't care about non-free non-software", eg. It's not the concept or the potential implementation, it's just the description that seems unsatisfactory.
Cheers, aj