On 5/2/25 11:04 AM, Bert Peters wrote:
Hi all,A while ago we as a distro decided to stop supporting Redis, due to their licence change [1], and move to Valkey. Through a combined effort, we removed all direct dependencies on redis, replacing them with vault and patching until that worked. The announcement was posted, and a deadline was set. This may or may not have caused Redis to reconsider their license change, and have announced another relicencing, this time to the AGPL [2] [3]. With that change, I personally believe there is no longer a reason to remove redis from [extra], and keep it in the repos as-is. Redis is almost but not quite compatible with Valkey, so dropping it without good cause would be a disservice to our community. Now, I don't want to make light of the harm that Redis inc initially wrought on the open source community with their license change, or waste the work that was done to make everything work with Valkey. Pushback like this is what caused the license change. As such, I propose we continue to use Valkey as the implementation for all purposes that don't strictly require Redis, and maintain Redis simply as a package for our commynity's convenience. That way, should the licensing change again in the future, we do not have a similar amount of work ahead of us. This seems to me the Arch way: pragmatic and user central. Now I know that this is not a universally shared opinion, so please consider this email an invitation for discussion on what we should be doing here. Cheers, Bert [1]: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@lists.archlinux.org/message/2ERGX565GSSBUMADBG7DQJYNPJD5GUXD/ [2]: https://antirez.com/news/151 [3]: https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/
At first I thought that we should continue with the removal so as not to encourage what the upstream has done, but now after giving it some more thought, I don't like the precedent that that would set. If someone wants to maintain Redis in [extra], they should feel free to do so, but we should still patch all packages to use one of the properly open source alternatives in all possible cases. In an ideal situation, Redis remains in [extra] with no revdeps so it can be immediately removed if any further upstream footguns occur.
Campbell Jones
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