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bug#46385: User awareness of Anti-Features
From: |
Ludovic Courtès |
Subject: |
bug#46385: User awareness of Anti-Features |
Date: |
Fri, 19 Feb 2021 16:22:34 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/27.1 (gnu/linux) |
Hi,
Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> skribis:
> I'll have to think some more on whether this is something Guix needs, but I
> do have a partial concrete implementation proposal:
>
> Packages can have a ‘properties’ field, e.g. from
> gnu/packages/bioconductors.scm:
>
> (define-public r-reactome-db
> (package
> (name "r-reactome-db")
> (version "1.70.0")
> [...]
> (properties `((upstream-name . "reactome.db")))))
>
> Maybe add a ‘anti-features’ entry field for some packages?
> E.g.,
>
> (define-public some-twitter-app
> (package
> (name "tweet")
> [...]
> (properties `((anti-features x y z)))))
>
> x, y and z can be symbols, e.g. based upon from
> https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/
>
> * ads (I don't think any application in Guix has these?)
> * tracking (should be patched out if possible)
> * non-free-network-services
> * non-free-dependencies (probably not allowed in upstream Guix, but maybe in
> a channel)
>
> The code behind ‘guix show’ and ‘guix search’ would need to
> be adjusted to display anti-features, and the ‘guix install’ code
> should warn if someone installs a package with anti-features.
I’m sympathetic with the idea of raising awareness of those
anti-features. However, I don’t see a clear way we could “define” each
possible anti-feature; some are definitely ill-defined (for instance, a
service is neither “free” nor “non-free” in the same sense as software
can be free or non-free.) It’s also not entirely clear to me how the UI
could make good use of it.
That said, there are anti-features that we have always patched out in
the past, such as tracking/“phoning home” and auto-upgrades. Perhaps we
could formalize that in our packaging guidelines?
Ludo’.