Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add p7zip.

[Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de>]

Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name> writes:

>> > I see that you took care of removing non-free parts in a patch and a
>> > build phase.  Since “guix build -S p7zip” doesn’t run the build phase
>> > users would still end up with a source archive containing the non-free
>> > parts.  The best way is thus to remove things in a snippet.
>> > 
>> > In “shogun” from the “machine-learning” module we remove supporting code
>> > for non-free features in a snippet by cutting out anything between some
>> > ifdef markers, but looking at the patch I see that it wouldn’t be
>> > feasible for p7zip.
>> 
>> Also note that it is not completely desirable for nonfree code to be removed
>> with a patch, and is one of the reasons Guix supports snippets in the first
>> place.
>
> Is there a reason to not use a patch in this case? Or can we proceed
> with packaging p7zip, using a patch to remove non-free parts?

We don’t want to have a “reverse image” of the non-free code in a patch.
Arguably that would just be a derivative of the non-free code, so we
also couldn’t freely distribute it.

We have to distinguish between code under a non-free license and bits
and pieces that refer to non-free software.  The former needs work as
done in shogun where the latter can probably be removed with a simple
patch in a snippet.

~~ Ricardo