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vrms for ArchLinux

Enumerates non-free packages (that is to say, under licenses not considered by OSI, FSF, and/or the DFSG to be Free Software) installed on an ArchLinux system. See vrms_arch/license_finder.py for the license categorization.

Copyright (C) 2013 Andrew Clunis <[email protected]>.

Released under the New 3-Clause BSD license (trololo!). See COPYING.

A reimplementation of the original vrms program from Debian for Arch's Pacman and ALPM.

Usage

List non-free packages (and count currently ambiguous/uncheckable packages, see Caveats)

vrms

Check all packages in locally synced package repositories (does not and can not include the AUR), not just locally installed packages:

vrms -g

Building

Build a package out of local checkout of this source code on Arch:

makepkg --noextract

This works because I include a src symlink that points to .., which fools makepkg into using the local checkout as the source.

The same PKGBUILD, without --noextract and the src symlink, will fetch whatever's on the stable branch of the GitHub repo.

Caveats

A great deal of packages in Arch, both free and non-free, use custom as the license field value. As per the Arch Packaging Standards, this indicates that the package does not use an exact copy of one of the licenses included in the core licenses package, which provides well-known free licenses at /usr/share/licenses/common. However, the Packaging Standards go on to say that the license field can be disambiguated in the form of custom: ZLIB or custom: PUEL. Sadly, there are 722 packages in the ArchLinux pacman repositories (Core, Community, Extra, and Multilib) that specify only custom. Many packages also carelessly use variant naming of well-known licenses (GPL-2, GPLv2, etc.) in spite of the Packaging Standards, causing further confusion.

Many commonly used Free Software licenses aren't included in the common licenses packages because they require editing to be applied to a given project, such as the BSD and MIT licenses.

The same problems extend to the AUR.