Re: [GNU-linux-libre] [libreplanet-discuss] programming language package manager

[Mark H Weaver]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>   > No.  Unfortunately, I don't see how our work in Guix could help to
>   > implement filtered repositories usable by existing language-specific
>   > package managers, except perhaps to extract the license information that
>   > we've recorded for our packages.
>
> That informaton could be very useful.  If there are some repos
> which don't explicitly say which packages are free, but you've
> recorded this, can you make that informatoin available
> in some easily-parsed way?

Yes, but I should mention some limitations in the license information
recorded in Guix.  We associate with each package a list of licenses,
but we do not distinguish between the following cases:

* Recipients who wish to redistribute may choose to follow the terms of
  one license from a set of options.

* Recipients who wish to redistribute must follow the terms of all of
  a set of licenses.

* Some code in the program is covered by license A, other code is
  covered by license B, etc.

We sometimes include a comment in the Guix source code to disambiguate
between these cases, and also to include details such as additional
permissions, but these details are not so easily extracted.

Also, for unusual licenses, we typically record them simply as
"non-copyleft", "fsf-free" or "x11-style" along with the name of a file
in the source code where the license can be found.

      Mark