Unofficial moonbases? (was Re: non-free vs. free packages)

[goran@krampe.se]

Hi Lunar fellas!

I admit to only having skimmed this thread, but just want to mention one
thing unless someone else already has mentioned it:

One way to at least partially solve the "what should we have in the
moonbase"-issue is to allow for *multiple unofficial moonbases*, call
them "satellites" or whatever. :)

I have been lobbying for this earlier btw. Anyone who has used Debian
(/etc/apt/sources.list) know what I mean. See www.apt-get.org etc.

If we had such a mechanism anyone could easily set up a repo for
non-free or semi-free or whater-you-like modules, and just publish the
repo in a central catalog eh... why not simply as a module inside the
moonbase that has a file that lists the URLs to those repos or whatever.

And given this then I would personally vote for keeping the official
moonbase "free" as in OSIs "open source" definition or whatever the core
community finds suitable (defining "free" isn't trivial as we all know).
A clear and simple rule anyway.

Now, I made a hackish solution for having unofficial moonbases in Lunar
a while back by putting /var/lib/lunar/moonbase/zlocal under version
control in Darcs (which is a distributed CM tool similar to Arch that
can do "cherry picking" and generally kicks all the other CM tools in
the bu^H^Hbehind), see here:

	http://swiki.krampe.se/gohu/33

Using that howto (which I still hope works, email me otherwise) you get
access to my modules that I maintain in a public darcs repository at:	

	http://darcs.krampe.se/zlocal/

As you can see a readonly darcs repo is just a normal filetree available
under http so feel free to manually fetch any modules you like.

Sidenote: Since then I actually became a Lunar dev, and then
unfortunately "real life" came back and stole my free time so even
though I now could have moved several of those modules to the official
moonbase I haven't had the time to do so.

regards, Göran