Bug#824383: gnome-software: packages not installed from repositories are claimed to be non-free

[Matthias Klumpp]

2016-05-15 18:58 GMT+02:00 Paul Wise <pabs at debian.org>:
> On Sun, 2016-05-15 at 18:42 +0200, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
>
>> Where would that (machine readable) metadata be? Parsing
>> debian/copyright files is impractical, especially if they are not
>> machine-readable (which is the case with Xchat).
>
> As I implied in the other email, the Section field in debian/control of
> source packages indicates if a package is non-free or not and this
> field is also present in the corresponding binary package and in the
> dpkg status file for all packages, including manually installed ones.

Yes, but consider that some random 3rd-party who doesn't know about
proper sections builds a package in section "misc": Then we would
claim the package to be free software while it clearly isn't.
TBH, I think any package not in the Debian repositories can not be
trusted to be DFSG-free at all, and therefore we shouldn't claim it to
be, unless the developer explicitly stated that in it's upstream
metadata by only having free licenses in its project_license tag.
That stuff is marked as "potentially non-free" is only a visual thing
btw, it won't prevent you to install/uninstall/rate the software.

(Marking this as wontfix early was probably a mistake, because I can
see why someone might have a different opinion on this matter... Maybe
that needs a project-wide decision, but from my experience 3rd-party
developers don't do packaging correctly and often produce bad deb
packages, and we really should not treat those as containing free
software, until it's clear that they are.)