Control fields for installer packages, and other vrms thoughts

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@flatline.org.uk>]

Hi,

It would be useful to have some way to automatically find contrib
installer packages for non-free software: in particular, it would mean
that vrms could start picking them up. Would it be reasonable to ask the
maintainers of such packages to include a field like 'Installer-Section:
non-free/foo' in their control files, similar to the field that
identifies some meta-packages? This would be very easy to implement, as
policy C.2.2.1 (from the old packaging manual) provides a way to include
such fields without special support from dpkg.

While I'm thinking about vrms, it's been a long-standing wishlist to
have vrms provide more verbose information about the packages it lists.
Unfortunately, we don't have mechanically parseable copyright files, and
it's probably unreasonable to expect the vrms maintainer to keep up with
every non-free package in Debian. Here's an idea which would distribute
the load:

We could recommend that non-free packages install a file of the form
/usr/share/vrms/<package>. That file could either be a short description
of why the licence is non-free, or a symlink to another file. If it's a
symlink, the target is of course displayed instead, so we can have a few
descriptions of particular licences or styles of licence in vrms itself.
For example:

  /usr/share/vrms/Not-For-Profit

    This license prohibits the distribution of the package for monetary
    profit. This fails point 1 of the Debian Free Software Guidelines
    ("The license of a Debian component may not restrict any party from
    selling or giving away the software ..."). For instance, many people
    sell CD-ROMs containing free software, including Debian, and people
    base businesses on free software.

    For more information, see:
      http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#semi-freeSoftware

This is kind of the opposite of /usr/share/common-licenses. :) Less
well-known licences or categories of licence can just include the
opinion of the package maintainer or whatever.

Are these good ideas? I did the last NMU of vrms, so I'm willing to
write the (relatively small amount of) code necessary to implement these
and ask for permission for further non-maintainer uploads.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]