Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Flavien Bridault <f.bridault AT fra.net>]

Le samedi 05 novembre 2005 à 10:58 +0100, Mathieu L. a écrit :
> Hi all,
> 
> <big snip>
> 
> > I'm just bringing it up for discussion.  
> > It wasn't even a complete proposal, more of a straw-poll and request for 
> > feedback.
> > 
> > Seth
> 
> Well,
> 
> I'm no team lead and I do not posess your skills for argumentation in
> english, that's why I usually keep my mouth shut but, that doesn't mean
> I don't care, as I've read every mail of this thread (and I hope most
> devs did). 

Same for me ^_^

> But if you ask everyone to say something about that, I'd say that on the
> overall I'm thinking more like you and I wish sourcemage could stick
> closer to the GPL (or whatever other definition we use for "free") for
> the licensing matters. 
> The spells are not what bother me the most because I like the z-rejected
> system where a user actually _knows_ his system is based purely on Free
> software if he doesn't use z-rejected (or am I wrong here?). Note that I
> wouldn't mind if it was a bit more difficult to use this grimoire for
> the sake of freedom. After all, I was used to install the nvidia drivers
> by myself, without using the spell, so I guess users could do that too;
> nothing prevents them from installing non-free software if they want to.

I also share this point of view. I agree with Seth's argument where he
says that we cannot really support non-free softwares, since we can't
patch sources. However, someone asked somewhere in this thread for the
definition of "support". For me it was already clear with z-rejected
that we support some sort of packaging of non-free softwares, but not
the softwares themselves.
I would be however very disappointed if we removed all spells with
non-free softwares, I use nvidia drivers and libcg for my researches and
I can't do anything without them. And I hate to install things that are
not tracked by sorcery. But if I understood the discussion far from
here, they should not be removed ? I have several questions about that,
I think the answers might have been in this thread, but it becomes so
long that it is quite hard to find them ;-)
If we try to be qualified as GNU-certified free distro :

1) Could non-free softwares still be installed by spells in our
z-rejected grimoire, which will be moved somewhere ?
2) Could the maintainer(s) of z-rejected still belong to the SMGL Team ?
3) Could we track bugs about z-rejected grimoire in our main bugzilla ?
4) If yes, shall we then sort the bugs, so that we refuse to correct
bugs that are not related to packaging ?
5) Will the providers be added with z-rejected ? For instance, will I
have JAVA or not ?

> 
> However, I've always been disturbed by the fact I have to use perforce
> to help developing smgl. I felt really bad about that and it stills
> bothers me everytime I do it, and I've actually thought several times to
> do as Rycee and not use it but it seems I'm too lazy to do that way. :/
> I realize there are special branching (or whatever it's called) needs to
> develop/maintain smgl properly, but I'm more than ready to use another
> scm even if that means to hassle much more than with perforce and that
> the whole system has to be rethought. 
> To conclude, I'm really
> glad/thankfull Afrayedknot some others are looking for alternatives to
> perforce because it's what I think is essential to progress towards 
> freedom for sourcemage, and I'm willing to help testing those scms but
> I'd need some directions as I'm not familiar at all with all that stuff.
> 
Agree too. I use tla everyday for my personal use, and I use it in a
"centralized way", with the repository on a server, that I join either
in local (at work it is in my NFS file account) or via ssh (at home). I
see finally not differences for this use comparing to perforce, except
that I have to enter a password for each operation at home (but I might
have believe it could be avoided) and that I don't have to explicitly
open file before editing them. But I must admit that I use very few
features, and I don't do complicated stuff with branches. I only create
branches for adding big new features in my application and merge them
later on the main branch. But anyway, as Mathieu, I'm not experienced
enough with scms to be able to say if it is sufficient for our team.

At last, I would argue that before doing anything, if we decide to do
this (or to help our decision) I think that may be a good idea to
contact gnu AT gnu.org, just to be sure that we have well interpreted the
rules, and that we will not do a hard work to be finally rejected ;-)

-- 
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
Flavien Bridault
Source Mage GNU/Linux - Disk Section Guru

irc: vlaaad
jabber: vlaaad AT amessage.be

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