[Bug 144006] The behavior of vrms

[Rogério Brito]

On Jul 30 2009, KarlGoetz wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:52:38 -0000 Rogério Brito <rbrito at ime.usp.br> wrote:
> > The situation that you are complaining about is that vrms takes into
> > account the section of the packages.
> > 
> > In general, if the section of a package doesn't match what its
> > copyright says, then the package has a bug and it should be fixed
> > ASAP.
> 
> Or that this bug is actually "VRMS is incorrectly named, and should
> not refer to RMS", since it is a reflection of the packages DFSG
> status, not RMS's views.

Some points here:

* vrms has this behaviour appropriately documented (by Bdale, after a
  short discussion that we had on the debian-vrms mailing list) that the
  program has this name based on the original ideal of providing only
  Free Software.

* for practical purposes, the decision of what is Free Software takes
  into consideration the section of the packages: if a potential
  distribution would package non-free software in a main repository,
  then vrms would not be able to provide a description of which programs
  are or are not Free Software.

  Indeed, if a packager prepares a package of some proprietary software,
  how can a program detect if the binary code of that package is or is
  not Free Software? There are no syntatic rules for this, I am afraid.
  This problem is essentially of human interpretation---and, indeed,
  even humans can't reach a consensus regarding what they consider Free.

But suggestions and patches for vrms are welcome, of course.


Regards, Rogério Brito.

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org

-- 
CC-by-sa reported as non-free
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/144006
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