GPL/non-GPL feature

As some libraries are GPL’d and are in some cases optional requirements of packages, it would be nice if we had a mechanism to control whether such packages do or do not get installed. Related we would need a way of controlling whether a package gets built with a GPL dependency or not. The simplest way that comes to mind ATM would be creating a gpl feature and corresponding package that needs to be installed to enable this. This might be too wide sweeping and it may require per package features. If it does start going in the latter direction, perhaps solving issue ( https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/3299 ) will give us something for this too.

[isuruf]

As @marcelotrevisani said, we are open to improvements. If you can’t work on it, have a look at https://conda-forge.org/docs/contracting/00_intro.html

[marcelotrevisani]

Example is simple matplotlib package, which installs qt pyqt pyqt5-sip etc. that are GPL, but are actually not needed for matplotlib to function without doing qt things.

We do have matplotlib-base which does not rely on qt

Another example is python-plugify. This installs both text-unidecode and unidecode, but the package only needs one of them. unidecode is GPL, but text-unidecode is Artistic. conda bundles both erroneously.

You can create a PR there to build this package in a separated branch without those dependencies, or maybe just add that as run_constrained

For now one has to manually post-hoc hack the package lists.

We are open to improvements and PR. However, I would not develop this for the simple fact that is a private company concern than a community concern.