[Fsf-Debian] [Dev] Comparison with Parabola

[Ramana Kumar]

OK It appears I misunderstood Parabola somehow. Thanks for the replies! :)
One remaining question I have there is: if everything in Parabola
repositories is free, then what is the point of the your-freedom
package?

But I don't want to discuss that too much on fsf-collab-discuss - we
can resume on a Parabola list (I subscribe to dev).

May I redirect this topic to my question pertaining to Debian:
Can Debian achieve FSF's view of being a free distribution (relatively
easily) by doing something akin to a your-freedom package?

On Sun, Aug 5, 2012 at 5:15 AM, Luke T.Shumaker <lukeshu at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> > 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