Re: maintaining bulk-{small,medium,large}

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:

> Updates, since I've been hacking things:

Thanks for all your work.  This is a huge improvement.  What follows is
a side rant about licensing for the record, not germane to what you did.

>  > 4. ghostscript. [...]
>  > 
>  > Proposal: move ghostscript-gpl to bulk-medium. Also drop its deps from
>  > bulk-small.
>
> As suggested, ghostscript is in bulk-medium now, and via the
> meta-package. The net practical effect of this, if nobody does
> anything special, is that the resulting build will build
> ghostscript-agpl and not ghostscript-gpl. Given how old and unsafe
> ghostscript-gpl is, this seems like a reasonable resolution, despite
> the various problems with the AGPL.

There are not "various problems" with AGPL, and I'd like to avoid
cargo-culting less-than-wicked-clear references.  The actual issues are:

  Some people are concerned that if pkgsrc allowed AGPL by default, then
  some other people would install packages without realizing this, and
  then construct larger proprietary services that use AGPL packages, and
  then offer them as a service over a network, triggering an obligation
  to provide all sources for the web service.  I am unaware of having
  heard of any actual such people who had this problem, only people that
  think such accidental-mixed-proprietary-AGPL-service people might
  exist. (As I said back then, pkgsrc's licensing mechanism does not
  support software development and especially commercial offerings; for
  that people need to know what they are doing and get legal advice.
  The licensing mechanism is merely to avoid installing non-Free
  licenses (or whatever set the admin chooses) without realizing it.)

  Some people have said that some companies have anti-AGPL policies and
  thus do not want AGPL software to appear on NetBSD machines being
  operated within those companies.  We heard of one such actual company.
  I don't see this as NetBSD's problem -- lots of people dislike lots of
  things and there are knobs -- but the current state blocks this by
  default.

But broadly, aside from these relatively small groups, there is no
problem.  To my knowledge, we have had no actual reports of trouble.

The point for bulk-foo is not an independent judgement that
ghostscript-gpl is unmaintained.  It is that pkgsrc's default is
ghostscript-agpl (which IIRC happened quite a while after the license
kerfluffle, after the GPL version was not in fact maintained).  As we
surfaced earlier and is true with other things, to the extent we can
follow whatever mk.conf knobs people set, that's great, so people get
customized bulk-foo.

We have ended up in a great place!

> (Realistically to the extent that licensing is a problem, the answer is
> to work on further disentangling ghostscript from things that don't
> need to use it. Since ~all distributed documents come as PDF and have
> for decades, the only place ghostscript _should_ appear is in the
> backend printing pipeline, or in printer firmware. It shouldn't need
> to be linked into or run from any application other than perhaps gv as
> a viewer for legacy documents. But I digress...)

Absolutely.  Anybody bothered by agpl should figure out how to not use
ghostscript.  However, I don't want us to impair functionality and
depart from upstream norms because of license fear.  The mechanism to
accomodate people who dislike AGPL is to set PKG_OPTIONS.gs_type.  The
other (99% ?) don't need accomodating, and we shoudn't mess them up to
accommodate those who refuse the AGPL but don't set the gs_type knob.

I expect gs to remain within the cups world indefinitely (and other
capable printing systems); printing systems need to accept PS and print
to non-PS printers.