From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: =?UTF-8?B?YWzDrXJpbyBleW5n?= Subject: Re: MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2016 11:02:17 +0000 Message-ID: References: <20160402041955.484a1cb1@top-laptop> <20160405175911.0307cc6d@top-laptop> Reply-To: Workgroup for fully free GNU/Linux distributions Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20160405175911.0307cc6d@top-laptop> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: gnu-linux-libre-bounces+gldg-gnu-linux-libre=m.gmane.org@nongnu.org Sender: gnu-linux-libre-bounces+gldg-gnu-linux-libre=m.gmane.org@nongnu.org To: GNUtoo@no-log.org Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org, gnu-linux-libre@nongnu.org List-Id: guix-devel.gnu.org On 4/5/16, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli wrote: >documentation (and packaging as you point it) can > steer users towards free software. ... > Which one to do would then depend on the context. > For instance with qemu and libvirt, the software was modified not to > steer users towards running non-free GNU/Linux distributions. qemu images seems big to package. in guix we can make non-substitutable packages. > While unrelated, the case of debootstrap is also interesting not unrelated at all. the guix way for qemu images would be packaging trisquel from debootstrap, parabola from pacstrap, ... >> hiding the emulator executable/package > I don't understand what it means. it is an opt-out whitelist implementation, i sketched it at [1]. in guix we can make a package not directly installable, but use it as a dependency for other packages; so it would go to the store but not to the profile and remain out of $PATH. in parabola we can make the executable install to /usr/exitingfreedistrofrontier and remain out of $PATH, but it would need to copy the executable to every game package or make a pacman wrapper to make it not directly installable. >> would warn when they are exiting the free distro frontier and poke >> them to add free games to the distro (suggesting to developers or >> sending patches) > That is very similar to documentation for me. i think skipping the documentation and using a general-purpose search engine like duckduckgo is quite common. making the user install some other packaged free software and execute a command like "PATH=$PATH:/usr/exitingfreedistrofrontier/wine/" could warn much better. >> alternatively, forking all emulators and creating a >> free community around them would also provide a freedom frontier > That is nice too. Uzebox seem in the right direction with that. not sure[2] looking up in dag, there's three kinds of packages: useless in freedom: ndiswrapper. mostly useless in freedom: wine. useful in freedom: qemu. useless packages should be removed. making a opt-out whitelist for mostly useless packages seems the better option. useful packages should get a opt-in whitelist. mame should be classified for each architecture: i386 and z80[3] are useful as development tools replacing current hardware. obsolete architectures are useless if only nonfree software depend on it, mostly useless otherwise. [1]http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2016-03/msg00021.html [2]http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Possible_copyright_violations [3]z80's are still produced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80