Re: Grammar checking in Emacs

[Peter Oliver <p.d.oliver@mavit.org.uk>]

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On Tue, 16 Nov 2021, Richard Stallman wrote:

>  > > AFAICT the most popular way to install it is as a "snap" package, which
>  > > I consider to be a euphemism for a blob :-(
>
>  > You can unzip prebuilt JARs from https://languagetool.org/download/LanguageTool-stable.zip, which seems simpler but similarly blobby.
>
> In principle, those JARs could make it easier to see the full list of
> contents and determine what nonfree files there are, if any.  But it
> looks like you don't think so.  Would you please expand on why you
> don't think so?

I was thinking only about our ability to modify the contents.

If a reputable GNU/Linux distribution includes a software package, then we can be sure that it’s known how to reproducibly build it from source.  If it becomes too hard for distributions to build from source, and people come to rely on developer-supplied pre-built artefacts instead (be they binaries, bytecode, container images, or whatever the next thing is), then I would be less confident.

My main point was to draw attention to the availability of the JARs.  The mention of blobbyness was only intended as a throwaway aside, to be honest.

-- 
Peter Oliver