Re: [GNU-linux-libre] [libreplanet-discuss] programming language package manager

[Mark H Weaver]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote, in response to Ludovic Courtès:

>   > > Does this mean that you have already implemented means to filter those
>   > > repositories and make free-only repositories from them?
>
>   > No, we just review things manually.
>
> How do you organize this work?  Have you set up a maintenance team for
> each of those repositories?

The process currently lacks coordination.  It is driven by individual
contributors importing packages into Guix as they wish (usually to
scratch their own itches) and submitting them as patches to the Guix
source code repository.

> Are the filtered repositories in the same format as the original ones?

No.  When we import a package into Guix, the result is in the form of
Scheme code within Guix.

> In other words, are they suitable in practical terms to use for
> other free GNU/Linux distros?

No.  Unfortunately, I don't see how our work in Guix could help to
implement filtered repositories usable by existing language-specific
package managers, except perhaps to extract the license information that
we've recorded for our packages.

On the other hand, Guix could benefit from filtered repositories by
making it easier for our contributors and reviewers to determine the
license information of packages and to avoid accidentally importing
packages that fail to comply with the FSDG.  We could also modify our
importers to use the filtered repositories by default, instead of the
unfiltered ones.

       Mark