Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[alírio eyng]

On 4/5/16, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli <address@hidden> wrote:
>documentation (and packaging as you point it) can
> steer users towards free software.
...
> Which one to do would then depend on the context.
> For instance with qemu and libvirt, the software was modified not to
> steer users towards running non-free GNU/Linux distributions.
qemu images seems big to package.
in guix we can make non-substitutable packages.

> While unrelated, the case of debootstrap is also interesting
not unrelated at all.
the guix way for qemu images would be packaging trisquel from
debootstrap, parabola from pacstrap, ...

>> hiding the emulator executable/package
> I don't understand what it means.
it is an opt-out whitelist implementation, i sketched it at [1].
in guix we can make a package not directly installable, but use it as
a dependency for other packages; so it would go to the store but not
to the profile and remain out of $PATH.
in parabola we can make the executable install to
/usr/exitingfreedistrofrontier and remain out of $PATH, but it would
need to copy the executable to every game package or make a pacman
wrapper to make it not directly installable.

>> would warn when they are exiting the free distro frontier and poke
>> them to add free games to the distro (suggesting to developers or
>> sending patches)
> That is very similar to documentation for me.
i think skipping the documentation and using a general-purpose search
engine like duckduckgo is quite common.
making the user install some other packaged free software and execute
a command like "PATH=$PATH:/usr/exitingfreedistrofrontier/wine/" could
warn much better.

>> alternatively, forking all emulators and creating a
>> free community around them would also provide a freedom frontier
> That is nice too. Uzebox seem in the right direction with that.
not sure[2]

looking up in dag, there's three kinds of packages:
useless in freedom: ndiswrapper.
mostly useless in freedom: wine.
useful in freedom: qemu.

useless packages should be removed.
making a opt-out whitelist for mostly useless packages seems the better option.
useful packages should get a opt-in whitelist.

mame should be classified for each architecture:
i386 and z80[3] are useful as development tools replacing current hardware.
obsolete architectures are useless if only nonfree software depend on
it, mostly useless otherwise.

[1]http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2016-03/msg00021.html
[2]http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title=Category:Possible_copyright_violations
[3]z80's are still produced
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80