[Mageia-dev] rehashing the faac issue

PhilippeDidier philippedidier at laposte.net
Tue Oct 30 03:40:08 CET 2012


andre999 a écrit :
> Christiaan Welvaart a écrit :
>> On Tue, 30 Oct 2012, Wolfgang Bornath wrote:
>>
>>> Nice to see that everyone went back to Start with this discussion,
>>> almost using the same words in their arguments. Is this really needed?
>>>
>>> There has been a wide consensus for the solution to put it into
>>> tainted as has been said in this thread as well. There are 2 options
>>
>> Each package in non-free must be inspected case-by-case to know if it
>> can be distributed/used, but their licenses are valid world-wide
>> (because copyright is pretty much universally accepted). The packages in
>> tainted can all be used/distributed *if* patents on software are not
>> considered valid in the country where the user/mirror resides. Do you
>> really want to mix those two?
> 
> Don't quite follow the logic, but maybe I misunderstand your point.
> 
> A package qualifies for nonfree if it is not open source (for whatever
> reason) and there are no restrictions on its' redistribution, world-wide.
> All official mirrors are required to carry nonfree repos, as well as core.
> 
> If there is some constraint on the redistribution of a package in some
> countries, such as patent claims or encryption technology used or
> whatever, mirrors in affected countries may reasonably want to avoid
> carrying such packages.
> For this reason, we created the "tainted" repos, which are optional for
> official mirrors.
> However we added the additional restriction that packages in tainted
> must also be open source, to satisfy those that don't want to install
> non-free packages.
> 
> If we want to continue this additional restriction, we would have to
> create another set of repos for packages that are both constrained
> (tainted) and non-free, in order to carry such packages.
> However there are very few packages that meet this restriction.  Also
> the tainted repos contain relatively few packages, compared with core
> and nonfree.
> 
> We could have used another approach.
> We could use a tag in the package name, or some other method, to clearly
> indicate that the package in question is non-free.
> Thus making it easier for those who wish to avoid non-free at all costs,
> to avoid installing non-free packages in the tainted repo.
> (But it still wouldn't remove non-free parts of the kernel.)


> 
> Note that packages in the tainted repos aren't distributed on iso, so
> that a user wanting tainted packages would have to download such
> packages from the net.  And thus such a user could even avoid having
> (uninstalled) tainted non-free packages on their computer.


> 
> In sum, I agree with the proposal of this thread to allow non-free
> packages in tainted repos.
> 
The problem :
In Tainted repo we can find now vlc-tainted, gstreamer-tainted,
mencoder-tainted... they are free indeed (because built without faac)

but what to do if we want to build them with faac : they are always
tainted but become non-free too !

For instance, with vlc (it's the same for mplayer or others) :

1) is it possible to have two versions of the same package in the same
repo ?
a vlc-free-tainted one (built with mp3 codec without faac) for strict
opensource users
and a vlc-nonfree-tainted one (built with mp3 decoder with faac) for
ordinary users, with an information for strict opensource users to avoid it

2) or must we choose one version ... and then who will be satisfied
only vlc-free-tainted (strict opensource users will be happy but other
ordinary users can't work on aac files)
only vlc-nonfree-tainted (everybody is happy except the strict
opensource users that can no more even hear mp3 files with vlc...)

If we can't satisfy everybody, we have to choose who must be satisfied,
and why !...


>>
>>      Christiaan
>>
> 




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