vrms


Question: does vrms work properly?

If not, is it going to be made to work properly by the time the Pyra is released?

It's using a fairly vanilla release of debian jessie armhf, my guess it should work. My devboard is dead at the moment, so I can't try it out myself.
 
The pyra specific stuff might not show up. aTc would have to put the blobs in a non-free branch on the repo
Right, there's some sort of list that vrms checks. If the Pyra-specific repositories include proprietary software, and vrms isn't configured to recognize this software, it will happily report that "RMS would be proud!" even if you have that proprietary software installed (since it doesn't know that it's proprietary). That's why I'm asking.
 
Well, whether or not the repos and vrms are set up so that vrms works really has nothing to do with whether or not the relevant proprietary programs work. It's a matter of intention for the most part.
 
Having VRMS work would be quite nice, as in "nice to know". Though using proprietary software may be practically obligatory, it is useful to be able to see, at a glance, what, and how much, non-free software one is using.

Of course, I would be surprised if it could (reliably) work with PNDs/DBPs/whatever, but those almost would not count as being "installed".
 
We do have a Debian repo already with Pyra specific things and most likely will be the home of the proprietary blobs, no clue on vrms support.
 
Was away from it for a while over Christmas Holiday, turned on my monitor and the video was garbled. I rebooted it, no response, nothing showing on the serial terminal. None of my known working SD cards work anymore. Some kind of hardware failure.
 
Well, the question would be, how does vrms get the information if something is non-free or not.
 
Well, the question would be, how does vrms get the information if something is non-free or not.
vrms is a short Perl script:


I'm not familiar with Perl, but as far as I can tell, it just checks whether the package is from a section called "contrib", "non-free", "restricted", "multiverse", or "partner". So all that needs to be done is, put proprietary stuff in a section called "non-free".

Optionally, a reason for a program being proprietary can be added to /usr/share/vrms/reasons.

vrms only reports non-DFSG stuff.
It's more specific than that. It reports stuff from repos the script recognizes as containing proprietary software.
 
What I meant is that vrms isn't based on any policy at all. It's based on the structure of the repositories. In Ubuntu, it is absolutely not true that it reports on DFSG; it effectively reports on Ubuntu's guidelines. In some distros, like Mint, it doesn't report anything meaningful at all.

I would like it if it does meaningfully report on proprietary software in the Pyra OS. Follow Ubuntu's example, not Mint's.
 
Question: How much more effort would it be to have a "free" and a "non-free" Pyra-specific repository, rather than just one, for system software (i.e. non-DBP/PND/whatever)? What would be in the "non-free" repo aside from GPU drivers?
 
Since these are only different sections, it seems to me the effort wouldn't be significant, assuming that it's already known which packages are non-libre. I'm not familiar with how Debian-based package repositories work, though.
 
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