Wikidata, Guix and the Free Software DIrectory [was: Re: [ELPA] New package: repology.el]

[Christophe Poncy]

On 1/7/21 2:49 PM, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> I see two ways we could possibly manage to use repology.org in the
> Free World.
> 
> * Find a way to distinguish free from nonfree packages.  I see two
> ideas One is to snarf the lists of free packages from Debian and
> Parabola.  Another is to see if free packages list a license that
> shows they are free.  You might have other ideas.
> 

Repology data can easily be found on Wikidata [1] but I wonder if
Repology can locate and merge their entries on Wikidata or if it was
done manually.

> 
> Does anyone have another idea?

Repology is a software directory but we already have such tool with the
Free Software Directory! [1][2]

Wikidata can natively distinguish free from nonfree packages. So one way
is to add all Guix variable names into Wikidata [3] and find a way to
link the Wikidata properties with the FSD entries…

Then Emacs can use the Mediawiki API to query the fetched data.


Christophe


[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P6931
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2537
[3] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P6765