[arch-dev-public] Additional Package ISOs

[Aaron Griffin]

On 9/28/07, Jason Chu <jason at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 12:00:27PM +0300, Roman Kyrylych wrote:
> > 2007/9/28, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>:
> > > On 9/27/07, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On 9/27/07, Andreas Radke <a.radke at arcor.de> wrote:
> > > > > Am Thu, 27 Sep 2007 18:33:09 -0500
> > > > > schrieb "Aaron Griffin" <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Opinions, what do you guys think? I haven't really heard much comment
> > > > > > on this topic so far.
> > > > >
> > > > > -1 from me
> > > > >
> > > > > Whoever will maintain such a script it will be very hard to satisfy all
> > > > > license issue.
> > > > > I prefer to solve the license issue first. Either let's move license
> > > > > critical packages into a certain non-free repo or mark them in their
> > > > > pkgbuild with some kind of a tag. I'd like to have the non-free repo
> > > > > solution.
> > > >
> > > > I'm so confused here! The _script_ should not care at ALL about
> > > > license issues, that is why the script will take a package list! It is
> > > > up to the person generating the ISO or package bundle to ensure they
> > > > are in compliance with any license issues, not the script.
> > >
> > > Yeah Dan got what I was intending.
> > >
> > > What I mean is a script that just uses a file that lists packages to
> > > build us a nice big fat ISO. I really doubt it'd be much more than a
> > > pacman --root=foo/, repo-add, and mkisofs.
> > >
> > > This way, through human interaction, we can specifically manage any
> > > and all license issues.
> > >
> >
> > I don't mind about such script, of course.
> > But since we're going to provide our own official OMGHUGE ISO - that
> > would be we who will need to check those packages for license then.
> > ;-)
> > Since license support in pacman is not on the top of current
> > priorities now and IMHO non-free repo is simpler aproach to solving
> > such issues - I agree with Andy here.
>
> I really don't think pacman needs to have license support.  When we create
> the ISO we will have a list of packages we want to build the ISO repo from.
> That list of packages won't include any packages that we aren't allowed to
> distribute. Tada.

Yeah, see. Jason (and Dan, earlier) has the right of it here. I think
this is (again) blown out of proportion. We all know there are license
issues with some packages. That's the way this works.

So how do we solve this? We *explicitly* list packages that should be
installed. It's no different if someone creates a "nonfree" repo
(which we don't want to do) - they are still listing packages they are
allowing.

The simplest way to "list packages" like this? A text file. We don't
need web interfaces. We don't need java tools. We don't need this
crap.

We need a text file.

This isn't rocket surgery here. We're not trying to solve complex
license issues. We're trying to make a list of packages we want to
distribute.