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FOSS only official repo? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/archlinux@lemmy.ml
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Is there a FOSS only repo like Debain's main? I couldn't see anywhere in The official repos if core allows non-free repos.

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[–] 1 point 8 months ago* (4 children)

Well, because Arch tries to be simple and pragmatic. The way the official repo is organized speaks volumes about its philosophy. Just read their FAQs

My bad, not FAQs, but their explanation page

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 8 months ago (3 children)

    I didn't see anything in that wiki that suggests why a simple check when installing a piece of software on whether it's license conflicts with a license you don't want to install isn't simple and pragmatic. Other distros like Gentoo do this.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (2 children)

    Because it adds something that is not essential, so it is not "simple". If package A depends on package B with an incompatible license then it needs to provide a means to specify alternate packages. Arch follows upstream with best effort possible, so changing dependency could be seen as breaking that. However, pacman already supports choosing alternate packages during installation so technically they could add it, but how many percentage of users are needing that convenience? Not to mention the arch team will need to maintain said list of alternatives for every dependencies. If you want, you can add it yourself via pacman hook to prevent you from accidentally installing non free software, or write a wrapper for pacman, or use other distro like Parabola.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    I don't think this requires any maintenance or swapping out alternatives. Just do a quick license check (I'm pretty sure that already part of package metadata) and put a little warning symbol if it is non-Free.

    So if I do something like "pacman -Ss browser" it'll put little flags against non-Free options so I know to be extra careful to install them.

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