Re: ELPA submission: mathjax.el

[Richard Stallman]

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  > A. If the build environment has Node/npm, all that is needed is to run
  > make math2svg.js.

node.js  is a collection of many Javascript programs, right?
Are we sure that they are all free software?

npm poses a deeper problem.  I could be mistaken here, but ISTR that
it contains lots of packages, some free and some not.  If you use
module Foo, and it is free, to link in dependenceies from npm,
checking whether those dependencies are free or not is manual labor.

If the situation is indeed like that, trying to use npm in the free
world is asking to lose.  We shouldn't enable access to it for
ourselves, let alone suggest that someone else do so!

If the situation is different from that, maybe that makes our situation
better, but could you please explain the actual situation with npm?

Do you have a list of the modules that mathjax depends on?

  > B. If the build environment can run containers, I can include a suitable
  > Dockerfile.

Container systems in general present the same kind of pitfalls as npm:
they put lots of free modules and lots of nonfree modules into a
bucket and making sure you don't pull out any of the nonfree ones is
your problem.

I've been told there are important differences between the well-known
container systems in this regard, and I don't remember how Docker
stacks up.  MAYBE if we consult a Docker expert we will find it can be
used safely.  But we had better study this carefully.

System distributions include binary packages to speed installation.
We can surely package mathjax this way somehow or other.  But we must
release sources with a build recipe too.  If we include mathjax
somehoe in Emacs, or in GNU in any way, we _must_ include a way to
build it from source.  That includes any special tools it needs.

If the makefile to compile mathjax uses a container, it had better
include the rules to build that container, manually specifying which
modules to include in the container.  Somewhere there must be rules to
rebuild THOSE modules from source.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)