On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 03:03:20 -0400 bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Jul 2023 02:29:07 -0400 bill-auger wrote: > > * third party package managers > > i will take this one issue to illustrate > > RMS has asked us to start a sprint on this issue - that is awesome!!! > - but most likely, only myself and gnutoo will volunteer to do it We probably need to find a better way to organize to enable more people with less time to dedicate to that to join the conversation. For instance we could: - Start preparing the discussions. For instance define bounded topic to discuss about. This could be done in wiki pages on Libreplanet. - Announce the discussions - After discussions, write one or more reports of it (for instance in the Libreplanet wiki). - Summarize the result of the discussions, more specifically the various arguments. - Wait for more input from people that didn't have a chance to participate, and/or do a next round of discussions but only for arguments that weren't summarized yet, and/or accept "patches" to the discussion results summary. Apart from the announce where we might need help from the FSF, we can do all the rest ourselves. > that is worth noting, because my favored option for _all_ of them, is > to exclude them from parabola, and accept packaging requests for > desirable packages from those repos - why? - because that is the very > reason why distros exist, isnt it? There are many valid use cases for third party package managers. I also don't see how they could be forbidden by the FSDG if they follow the FSDG. But if distributions have additional rules on top of the FSDG (Parabola does), they tend not to follow these rules. But it's probably best here to have this discussed in Parabola later on and then maybe publish the results of that discussion here in case other distributions want to follow the same path. Though I don't know if any other FSDG compliant distributions are considering discussing something like that which here means also excluding third party package managers that are FSDG compliant. > so i would be doing that work only for the benefit of other distros, > despite that i believe it is not the best course of action - if i, > like other distros, were acting only on the behalf of my distro, i > too would have no incentive to do this work on behalf of other > distros (ie: the ones who want this junk should be the ones to clean > it up) Unfortunately users that have a use case that is fulfilled only with bad quality free software will tend to use it anyway. So the only thing we can do here is probably to try to organize to find ways around some bad quality software development practices, to find other ways to fulfill similar use cases with different software or approaches, etc. A way here would probably be to explain what issues some software or technologies have, and try to see if there are other ways to fulfill the use cases (for instance by writing documentation on the Libreplanet wiki, or designing a website for that, etc). But here ironically, banning all third party FSDG compliant repositories in a specific distribution will tend to make getting high quality packages harder in general because different distributions have different set of packages, and so it might be interesting to be able to reuse the packages of another distribution. > still, i would do it, if i thought for a moment that any of those > other distros would appreciate the effort, or have any incentive to > even consider the results > - but i have every reason to be pessimistic about that, as things > stand - i can not in good conscience, do that work on the behalf of > people who will most likely reject it, some of whom have promised in > advance to ignore it - like anyone else, my time is valuable - i > would rather spend that time doing something constructive We indeed do not have infinite time, and so here it also brings concern over how to spend resources. In some cases the only way to get specific packages (Freedombox) in FSDG compliant ways is through a single distribution (PureOS). Building Replicant in Parabola is also impossible because it would require way too much work and constant maintenance, and even if many people did that work, it would still be impossible to build older Replicant versions (which is sometimes needed for testing). Yet some of our potential contributors use Parabola, and we loose important potential contributors because of the complicated setup. So here the only way I saw that works is to enable users to install packages from other FSDG compliant distributions. How that should work out (who should provide packages for that, how to make sure it's secure, etc) should probably be discussed on the Parabola mailing list instead. Denis.
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