Leo Famulari <l...@famulari.name> writes: >> > I see that you took care of removing non-free parts in a patch and a >> > build phase. Since “guix build -S p7zip” doesn’t run the build phase >> > users would still end up with a source archive containing the non-free >> > parts. The best way is thus to remove things in a snippet. >> > >> > In “shogun” from the “machine-learning” module we remove supporting code >> > for non-free features in a snippet by cutting out anything between some >> > ifdef markers, but looking at the patch I see that it wouldn’t be >> > feasible for p7zip. >> >> Also note that it is not completely desirable for nonfree code to be removed >> with a patch, and is one of the reasons Guix supports snippets in the first >> place. > > Is there a reason to not use a patch in this case? Or can we proceed > with packaging p7zip, using a patch to remove non-free parts?
We don’t want to have a “reverse image” of the non-free code in a patch. Arguably that would just be a derivative of the non-free code, so we also couldn’t freely distribute it. We have to distinguish between code under a non-free license and bits and pieces that refer to non-free software. The former needs work as done in shogun where the latter can probably be removed with a simple patch in a snippet. ~~ Ricardo
