[Mageia-dev] cinelerra/audiokonverter/arista (war Re: rehashing the faac issue)

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi Wolfgang, *,

On Thu, Nov 1, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Wolfgang Bornath <molch.b at googlemail.com> wrote:
> [...]
> After reading all arguments again I must confess that I changed my
> opinion: Being consequent and following our road we need a
> /tainted-free and a /tainted-nonfree branch.

I still think this would be a very user-*un*friendly way to handle it.

You cannot put packages that itself is "free", but depends on
"tainted&nonfree" packages into the "free" repo, since the core repos
need to be self-contained.

The natural approach would then be to put that package into the same
repo as the packages that fulfill the requirement.

If now you have two tainted repositories, one "free" and one
"non-free", you would put the "free with dependencies" package into
the tainted-free repo. But it itself isn't tainted, so actually
wouldn't belong in there. But even when you have tainted-free enabled,
and you try to install the package, you need to enable the
tainted-nonfree one.
Or you put it into tainted-nonfree to keep the repos more
self-contained, but then the distinction is rendered useless, as
packages end up there for completely different reasons.

And if you have to enable both tainted variants anyway, there is no
point in having them separate in the first place other than to please
some bureaucratic nitpicking.

So by creating a tainted-nonfree repo that only a handful of packages
actually belong into anyway, you create a situation of non-satisfiable
dependencies that make the distinction pointless from a user-POV.

Much better would then be to create an "ugly" repo (in the spirit of
gstreamer) that contains the "doesn't fit into the other repos" stuff.

AFAIK only multimedia related stuff falls into tainted-nonfree. And it
is either you want to use it or not. If you want to use it, the user
doesn't care whether it is free or nonfree (by whatever definition,
there isn't the one-and-only definition that everyone agrees with
anyway). You only might care about whether it is tainted or not (and
many don't give a damn about software patents even where they could
apply in theory). It is not like you have a chance in most of these
cases. Either you use a "100% free but sucks" implementation, or you
use the "tainted and possibly "nonfree", but working just fine" one.

ciao
Christian