[Fsf-Debian] [Dev] Comparison with Parabola

[Luke T.Shumaker]

> > Parabola currently does nothing about the AUR, but there is a feature
> > request for dealing with it in their bug tracker.
> 
> AUR isn't a part of Parabola, the only recommendation of it I noticed is
> a script that fetches a package from it, checking if it's known to be
> nonfree (or depending on nonfree packages) and asks the user to check if
> it's free.  I believe such a script might be ok.

I believe you are referring to the `aur` script that is part of
libretools. The script is not meant to be used by 'normal users', but
by Parabola packagers (like all of the libretools package).

On that note, should we patch wget and gcc to warn to make sure that
what you're downloading and compiling is free? :)

> 
> > Why does the FSF endorse Parabola given the situation above where
> > nonfree packages are available?
> 
> These packages aren't included in the distro and they aren't recommended
> (unless you can show a specific example of this, there might be bugs).
> You can install nonfree software using any distro, the availability of
> external repositories with nonfree packages doesn't affect the
> endorsement (as also the Fedora comment suggests and other distros on
> the list).

We now have two separate bug trackers for bug-bugs and freedom-related
bugs. However, on the old bug tracker, anything freedom-related was
automatically 'critical'; more important than actual bugs. If you know
of any nonfree non-free code that is available from our repositories,
please let us know.

> (Ccing the Parabola development list, since this suggests the
> documentation being misleading and probably other contributors
> understand these issues better than me.)

Happy hacking!
~ Luke Shumaker