[packagekit] Free and non-free filter

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 22:12 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-12-03 at 16:57 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Wouldn't it be a lot easier to do the checking on the repository level?
> > I mean, distributions that care about these things are normally pretty
> > good at ensuring compliance and sorting packages into the proper
> > repositories. Notably rpm-fusion will have two repositories [1] that
> > AFAICT maps to Debian's non-us and non-free. 
> 
> I'm not sure all repos are that militant about licences - I've seen
> repos with non-free and free stuff in the same entry. 

I'd say that's a distro problem then.

> It's not a bad
> idea tho. Maybe a backend could do the "is free?" filter based on the
> repo metadata (or name, ick ick ick).

Yeah, I'd just filter on the name to begin with. I mean, at some point
you're going to have per-distro backends or at least configure the
per-depsolver backend with what distro it is serving. Or something like
that.

I'd also recommend having an extensible scheme of what flags applies to
the repository and start with three of them

 FREE
 FREE_BUT_ENCUMBERED
 NON_FREE
 (these identifiers suck; suggest to find better ones)

For future expansion, it might even be useful to make these bitfields
non-exclusive even though they can't be combined right now.

     David