[sshine]

This policy is missing from nixpkgs, although there is a similar policy for the build process for technical reasons.

So I can add spotify or signal-desktop to NixOS via nixpkgs, and they won’t succeed at updating themselves. But they might try, which would be a violation of Debian’s guidelines.

It’s a tough line — I like modern, commercial software that depends on some service architecture. And I can be sure it will be sort of broken in 10-15 years because the company went bust or changed the terms of using their service. So I appreciate the principles upheld by less easily excited people who care about the long term health of the package system.

[mort96]

In the process of trying to update, Spotify on NixOS will likely display some big error message about how it's unable to install updates, which results in a pretty bad user experience when everything is actually working as intended. It seems fair to patch software to remove such error messages.

[jchw]

To be fair, we (Nixpkgs maintainers) do remove or disable features that phone home sometimes even though it's not policy. That said, it would be nice if it was policy. Definitely was discussed before (most recently after the devbox thing I guess.)

[sshine]

Discord downloads stuff every single time I start it. So there is definitely not a policy to remove this behaviour.

And yes, good point, this was indeed discussed when devbox enabled AI training by default. It somehow seems like there is more than one category of phoning home at play here, since it is obviously tolerated in other cases.

[jchw]

What I mean is, it definitely isn't explicit policy to remove features that phone home; but, it is sometimes still done at the package maintainer's discretion. For things that are unfree all bets are off. (Removing or interfering with such code may be against the license.)