Unfortunately, there is no way to claim that we are under a Free Software/Open
Source licence without also claiming to be under a licence that we are not or
claiming to have approval from DFSG or OSI, which we haven't.
Until now, I erred on the side of choosing the licence that is closest to our
from the list (GPL), but that was a bad idea and now I'm erring on the side of
not including a machine-readable licensing claim at all.
Hopefully humans who are interested will quickly find out that we are actually
under a Real Free Software Licence.
But really, this underscores that we need to talk to FSF, edit our licence for
clarity of intent, and submit it to DFSG/OSI.
This means that by default the allmydata-tahoe egg will be a directory with a tree of files instead of a zip file containing files. I prefer the former because it makes it easier for people to hack into it.
Unfortunately the files therein are still going to be .pyc's instead of .py's, if I understand correctly. I would prefer for them to be .py's. See also discussion on the distutils-sig mailing list:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2007-July/007827.html
Now the instructions about how to download debian packages live on a separate
page of the wiki instead of on the front page or in the README. The README is
only about building from source. The front page contains pointers to those two
other pages (the debiandownloadpage and the README).
Note that using "whatever version of python the name 'python' maps to in the current shell environment" is more error-prone that specifying which python you mean, such as by executing "/usr/bin/python setup.py" instead of executing "./setup.py". When you build tahoe (by running "make") it will make a copy of bin/allmydata-tahoe in instdir/bin/allmydata-tahoe with the shebang line rewritten to execute the specific version of python that was used when building instead of to execute "/usr/bin/env python".
However, it seems better that the default for lazy people be "whatever 'python' means currently" instead of "whatever 'python' meant to the manufacturer of your operating system".
