[Trisquel-devel] nonfree stuff in PPAs? Suggestions for add-apt-repository improvements

[Felipe Sanches]

Good morning,

When people add PPA repositories they risk making non-free packages
inadvertently available in their APT package database.

While the main repositories in our distro are carefully cleaned up, what
can we do to help users who need packages that are not officially part of
the distro to avoid nonfree software?

Maybe a simple first measure could be simply a warning message to be
displayed when users add repositories using add-apt-repository. It could
say something like:

"You are adding an external repository that is not mantained by the
Trisquel dev-team. There may be non-free packages available from this
external source. Are you sure you want to proceed?"

Additionally, we could gather statistics on which are the most popular
PPAs, so that maybe Trisquel contributors could check whether these are
clean of non-free packages and thus publicly endorse it.

Another useful hack would be to patch apt so that it informs the user when
a package to be installed has been selected from a PPA and then warn the
user about the need to check whether it's actually free software.

happy hacking,
Felipe "Juca" Sanches
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.trisquel.info/pipermail/trisquel-devel/attachments/20120203/a74908c2/attachment.html>