Re: Guix and FSDG

[Giovanni Biscuolo <g@xelera.eu>]

Hello,

"Thompson, David" <dthompson2@worcester.edu> writes:

[...]

> This exact
> circumstance was brought up in the early days of the Guix project when
> FSDG compliance was a big topic of discussion because Ludovic and RMS
> were making sure that Guix conformed to it.  It is true that Guix will
> download source archives for packages that *may* contain files with a
> nonfree license.  However, Guix has a special mechanism developed
> specifically to deal with this issue.  In Guix, the <origin> data type
> is used to store information about a package's source code.  In this
> data structure there is a field called "snippet" which may contain a
> custom procedure written by the person that wrote the package.  The
> role of the snippet procedure is to *remove* any files in the source
> archive that are not freely licensed.  The result is a new source
> archive that contains only freely licensed files.  The most important
> part of this process is that the original source archive is *never*
> accessible to the Guix user via any Guix tools.  The original archive
> is discarded and does not end up in the canonical location for Guix
> data: /gnu/store.  Thus, running `guix build --source
> problematic-package` will only ever return the cleaned archive, never
> the original with nonfree files.  Therefore, Guix has taken sufficient
> technical measures to avoid steering its user towards nonfree software
> and thus Guix is compliant with the FSDG.

[...]

can we please consider to add a specific section to the manual including
a properly redacted copy of this exact text?

I think that specifically stating that no non-free code will be saved in
store due to ``guix build`` is specifically addressed by the snippet
field in <origin> (other procedures?) *and* assessed [1] by guix
maintainers will be of great help in all future discussions on this
topic (and there will be other discussions :-) )

WDYT?

David whould you like to propose a patch if anouth consensus on this
topic is reached? If you cannot, I can help on this.


Thanks! Gio'



[1] it means that missing to remove non-free code is considered a bug
and treated accordingly to the FSGD

-- 
Giovanni Biscuolo

Xelera IT Infrastructures