vrms-rpm - Man Page

vrms-rpm [OPTION] ...

This program is a clone of the original vrms ("virtual Richard M. Stallman") program for Debian GNU/Linux, created with the purpose of bringing its brilliant idea over to RPM-based GNU/Linux distributions.

This program analyses the list of currently installed RPM packages and reports found non-free packages to stdout. The decision on whether to classify a package as free or non-free is based on the Fedora Project licensing guidelines.

Fedora / CentOS users using additional repositories, such as RPM Fusion, may notice that not all packages coming from non-official repos are marked as non-free. This is because the distinction, as noted before, is made depending on the package licence. There are various reasons, apart from licensing, why a package may not have been accepted into the official Fedora / CentOS repository – such as software patents or export restrictions.

Richard Stallman has been, for years, the most prominent and vocal figure in the Free Software movement, relentlessly reminding us on issues of software ethics. Like Richard, we believe that users should have an easy way to know whether they’re running non-free software on their systems. This program is an attempt to fulfil that need.

--ascii

Display rms ASCII-art when no non-free packages are found, or when non-free packages are 10% or more of the total.

--colour <auto, never, always>

Controls whether terminal escape sequences should be used for colourizing the output. Default is 'auto', which uses colour output when writing to a terminal, but not when writing to a file or a pipe.

--describe

When listing packages, include the package summaries (short descriptions).

--evra <auto, never, always>

Apart from the package names, print also their epoch:version-release.arch. Default is 'auto', which does this only when multiple packages with the same name are found.

--explain

When listing packages, display licences as to justify the free / non-free classification.

--grammar <loose, spdx-strict, spdx-lenient>

Specifies the grammar rules used when parsing the license strings.

loose

Use an informal, loose grammar. This is the behaviour used by vrms-rpm v2.2 and earlier.

spdx-strict

Employ the SPDX License Expression rules.

spdx-lenient

The same as above, but relax some rules regarding case sensitivity and whitespace.

The default value is "spdx-lenient".

--help

Display a short help on program usage and exit.

--image

Like --ascii, but displays an image using terminal escape seqences and Unicode half-height blocks.

--licence-list <FILE>

Specifies the list of good licences to use for classifying packages. FILE can be a path to a file on disk, or one of the bundled licence lists:
· fedora
· spdx-fsf-and-osi
· spdx-fsf-or-osi
· spdx-only-fsf
· spdx-only-osi
· suse
· tweaked
The default value is "tweaked".

--list <none, free, nonfree, all>

Apart from displaying the total number of free and non-free packages, also list packages by name. The default value for this option is "nonfree".

--version

Display version information and exit.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Good_Licenses

The Fedora Project wiki page on accepted software licences.

https://spdx.org/licenses/

The SPDX licence list, an attempt at standarizing licence identifiers.

https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/v2.3/SPDX-license-expressions/

Document detailing the SPDX License Expression grammar.

This program itself it available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

Written in early 2017 by suve.