2016-05-15 18:58 GMT+02:00 Paul Wise <p...@debian.org>: > On Sun, 2016-05-15 at 18:42 +0200, Matthias Klumpp wrote: > >> Where would that (machine readable) metadata be? Parsing >> debian/copyright files is impractical, especially if they are not >> machine-readable (which is the case with Xchat). > > As I implied in the other email, the Section field in debian/control of > source packages indicates if a package is non-free or not and this > field is also present in the corresponding binary package and in the > dpkg status file for all packages, including manually installed ones.
Yes, but consider that some random 3rd-party who doesn't know about proper sections builds a package in section "misc": Then we would claim the package to be free software while it clearly isn't. TBH, I think any package not in the Debian repositories can not be trusted to be DFSG-free at all, and therefore we shouldn't claim it to be, unless the developer explicitly stated that in it's upstream metadata by only having free licenses in its project_license tag. That stuff is marked as "potentially non-free" is only a visual thing btw, it won't prevent you to install/uninstall/rate the software. (Marking this as wontfix early was probably a mistake, because I can see why someone might have a different opinion on this matter... Maybe that needs a project-wide decision, but from my experience 3rd-party developers don't do packaging correctly and often produce bad deb packages, and we really should not treat those as containing free software, until it's clear that they are.)
