Re: [gentoo-dev] Gentoo internal structure

[Aron Griffis <agriffis@gentoo.org>]

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Hi Brett,

Brett I. Holcomb wrote:	[Thu Nov 20 2003, 09:34:36PM EST]
> Gentoo is a distro that allows us to get work done and not get into
> the "if you use non-free software you have betrayed humanity"
> argument.  ... The person raising the question is a zealot who will
> accept nothing less then all free software and no non-free.  That was
> explained many times and he, like all of us have a choice - use a
> distro that fits whatever philosophy you have.

Unfortunately you have missed the point of Gentoo.  The point of Gentoo
is to give choice to the users.  The concept of Gentoo as a
metadistribution is that Gentoo can be whatever distribution you want it
to be.  Granted, there are bounds since we're not going to implement
Gentoo with rpms, but nonetheless, *this* is the point of Gentoo: Let
the user decide.  See http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/philosophy.xml 

In this case, what this means is that we need to implement
ACCEPT_LICENSES in a clean, unobtrusive way with reasonable defaults so
that (1) it doesn't get in your way, (2) the free software zealot can
run Gentoo with pride.

As Jason mentioned, putting reasonable defaults into make.defaults
accomplishes #1.  The default might even be ACCEPT_LICENSES='*', in
which case modification in make.conf would need to be something like
ACCEPT_LICENSES='-* GPL-1 GPL-2' (which then accomplishes #2)

I'm all in favor of this change.  So far we've been accumulating
licenses in /usr/portage/licenses without a final goal for that
directory.  This change would finally make use of that directory and
supply something that some of our users want, without making a headache
for the rest of us.

Aron

-- 
Aron Griffis
Gentoo Linux Developer (alpha / ia64 / ruby / vim)
Key fingerprint = E3B6 8734 C2D6 B5E5 AE76  FB3A 26B1 C5E3 2010 4EB0


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