Yum and SRPMs

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2005 at 12:50:59PM +1030, n0dalus wrote:
> Notice "offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the
> same place". I'm not trying to say or imply that anything is violating
> the GPL here, but I think some users expect this equivalent access to
> mean that it's just as easy to get the source rpms. And I think the
> designated 'place' here is yum.

I've thought about this too, especially as things like "oh, the repo is
actually provided via HTTP" become near-invisible (which is both inevitable
and good as the infrastructure gets better). But I think having yum-utils
able to do the job satisfies the issue quite nicely. It uses the exact same
infrastructure, after all.

When, in the future, yum GUI tools become so good that most users don't even
consider the command-line version, those GUI tools should consider this too,
not just for the sake of hewing to a particular strong interpretation of the
GPL, but because source access is an important part of the free software /
open source culture, and it shouldn't be a buried secret option.


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org          <http://mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>              <http://linux.bu.edu/>