Re: conditionally "dependent", by license?

"Larson, Timothy E." <[email protected]> writes:

> Package Alpha does not depend on anything. However, to get the full
> experience of Alpha, you ought to install package Beta as well.  Alpha
> and Beta have differing non-free licenses.
>
> (Assuming acceptance of Alpha's license) I think the ideal default
> behavior would be to install Beta if Beta's license is also accepted,
> but continue the Alpha installation (pop a notice to the user "please
> accept Beta License and install Beta for full experience") if not. Is
> this supported?
>
> I know it is possible to add the dependency, with an option to disable
> it. What I'm hoping for is that there is a way to automate this for
> improved user experience, since the user's pkgsrc installation should
> already know what licenses the user wants to accept. But maybe it is
> technically infeasible.

Technically, you can just

  add an option for Beta dependency, and disable by default

  enable the option if Beta's license is in DEFAULT_ACCEPTABLE_LICENSE

However, I'm not in favor of this.  Currently the license framework
exists to prevent building software with potentially displeasing
licenses by accident, and it's orthogonal to desired configuration.  If
you try to build something which naturally depends on a package with an
icky license, it fails, and you are faced with what to do.  If the
depending program would not be significantly impaired, then the
nonfree-license dependency tends to be optional.

Having options flipped based on licenses would lead to non-repeatable
builds.  Now, the build comes out a certain way, or packages fail to
build.  I think this kind of reproducible result (subset) is a feature.

So far, the only cases that have come up where it's been difficult is
mplayer, which has non-free plugins and might or might not be free
itself, and (in the past) graphviz.

It would help to discuss an actual case, rather than theoretical ones,
because the appropriate solution may be entirely different.

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