Re: Guix and FSDG

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 at 19:00, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:

> Clément Lassieur <clement@lassieur.org> skribis:
>
> > Indeed 'guix build --source' returns the freed source.  However, the
> > original archive does end up in /gnu/store, and its path in displayed
> > during the build.
>
> (Only if you build from source, without substitutes, etc.)

If I read correctly, Clément just points out inaccuracies of the
David's answer [0]:

[0] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-11/msg00376.html


<<
The most important
part of this process is that the original source archive is *never*
accessible to the Guix user via any Guix tools.
>>

Correct, even if Guix tools is vague. Is "guix repl" a Guix tools? :-)


<<
The original archive
is discarded and does not end up in the canonical location for Guix
data: /gnu/store.
>>

Incorrect, as Clément shows. And it is not a bug of the very
particular zpaq package, but a general feature of how Guix works.


<<
Therefore, Guix has taken sufficient
technical measures to avoid steering its user towards nonfree software
and thus Guix is compliant with the FSDG.
>>

> The spirit of the FSDG is that the distro must not provide, recommend, or
> link to non-free code, and I think Guix is following that to the letter.

We all agree on that. I guess.


In the initial Raghav's message, it seems that the argument is:
because Guix downloads non-free code in order to install free
software, then Guix does not follow the FSDG. This argument misreads
the current FSDG. For example, any GNU/linux distribution needs to
download non-free blobs and then removes them. Even, the FSDG webpage
[1] points to scripts [2] that remove these non-free blobs. The
keyword in the FSDG is "installable" and nothing is said about
"download", from my understanding.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
[2] http://www.fsfla.org/svn/fsfla/software/linux-libre/scripts/


> For the record, this issue was discussed in the early days of Guix and I
> don’t think anything has changed since then.  The current behavior of
> ‘guix build --source’ stems from those discussions (that was ca. 2015,
> but I can’t find the links now).

I have not found neither.

However, from my perspective, all this seems more a troll than a real issue. :-)



All the best,
simon