Subject: How to resolve? (Re: [bug#52109] [PATCH] gnu: Add unrar-free.)

From: Simon Tournier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2023 16:20:32 +0100

Hi Liliana,

On jeu., 12 janv. 2023 at 21:29, Liliana Marie Prikler <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> could this be a reason not to include a FSDG compliant software in
>> Guix?
>
> A free system distribution must not steer users towards obtaining any
> nonfree information for practical use, or encourage them to do so. [4]

Liliana, it is *your* interpretation that unrar-free is–quoting
FSDG–“steering users toward obtaining any non-free information for
practical use, or encourage them to do so”.  It is not the
interpretation of Trisquel folks.  It is not my interpretation and
probably also not the interpretation of many other peers here.

For instance, a previous version of unrar had been added by commit,

        0da8313c679f101c3f99970c50d6f0fef995f633
        Author:     John Darrington <[email-masked]>
        AuthorDate: Wed Mar 1 07:00:05 2017 +0100
        Commit:     John Darrington <[email-masked]>
        CommitDate: Wed Mar 1 18:57:00 2017 +0100

and then removed by 2560aa7adbfcb46306e8b19180bd48d39c2da6dc:

        gnu: Remove unrar.

        This package is abandoned upstream and contains serious bugs:

        http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2017/q3/329
        https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-14120
        https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-14121
        https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2017-14122

        * gnu/packages/compression.scm (unrar): Remove variable.

Therefore, I am still missing what is blocking. ;-)

The fact that FSDG is poorly worded is one thing, indeed.  This sentence
“steering users toward obtaining any non-free information for practical
use, or encourage them to do so” from these FSDG could also be
interpreted to many other features – another story. :-)

>From my point of view, all the packages allowing interoperability across
various operating system (including non-free ones) fits my understanding
of the Liliana’s interpretation of “steer users toward obtaining any
non-free information for practical use, or encourage them to do so”;
interpretation mainly based – again, if I understand correctly – on
speculations about the user’s intention.  Therefore, we should also
remove the packages: mednafen, docx2txt, antiword, bochs, cabextract,
cl-mssql, emacs-powershell, etc.

Any free reimplementation potentially offers a degraded experience
compared to the proprietary product.  It does not appear to me an
argument to raise that this potentially degraded experience leads to
“steering users toward obtaining any non-free information for practical
use, or encourage them to do so”.  Even, from my point of view, it is
the contrary: a free reimplementation even with weakness is liberating.

Last, I do not understand your Liliana argument about «Obviously,
unrar-free has a different CLI – that's is whole shtick, after all – but
I'd argue that this doesn't matter, because the people who prefer CLI
over GUI know how to read manpages.».  Well, we could apply it many
flavor of similar tools.  For instance, you would be in favor to
remove/drop the CLI dulwich provided by the package python-dulwich since
CLI Dulwich user could just read the Git man pages.  Or similarly bmake
vs make, coreutils vs busybox vs toybox, etc.

Without saying that I do not even know which Guix package provides this
bsdtar tool, from this FreeBSD tar manpage [1], it is not clear if RAR
is supported or not.  To know it, one needs to open this other man page
[2].  Bah, yes an easy CLI matters!

All in all, it appears that we disagree. :-)

Cheers,
simon

1: <https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tar&sektion=1>
2: <https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=libarchive-formats&sektion=5&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+13.1-RELEASE+and+Ports>