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Re: ghostscript & agpl



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

> On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 08:49:44AM +1300, David Sainty wrote:
>  > Whilst not necessarily a vote, I will say that unless you're a user
>  > that's tracking the reason for decisions in Pkgsrc, having a default
>  > "ghostscript" and then another "ghostscript-xxx" can be confusing,
>  > because it's not clear which one you want - does one have extra
>  > features? Is one deprecated?
>
> That's a good point.

It is a good point, but I think a sane default is that the unqualified
name aims to be what upstream considers the canonical version.  In the
case of ghostscript, upstream's view is clearly "ghostscript is AGPL,
what's the problem, stop whining".  We're talking about having an extra
package for people that don't like that.

Also, I believe that we should explain in DESCR what the different is
between packages with similar names.  Having the exact same DESCR is not
useful.

>  > Tentatively, I'd say that having two packages that are both explicitly
>  > flagged with the key difference (I.e. suggestion 4) is less confusing.
>
> so this is what I'm going to do.
>
> And I'm going to do it now, because nobody else has yet and right now
> is the only window I have to do anything before the freeze.

I don't like this (because we're having an other than simple name to
represent the package that straightforwardly captures what upstream has
releaseed), but I will stop short of objecting.   I think people who see
ghostscript and ghostscript-gpl can read DESCR, and find

 This is the version that corresponds to the lastest upstream release,
 which is under the AGPL.

vs

 This ia an old version, the last one released under the GPL before
 upstream changed to AGPL, as a convenience to pkgsrc users who would
 rather run older code than use code under the AGPL.

which should make it pretty clear.  (That's intended to be a
dispassionate description without value judgements.)

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