Blacklist
This article describes what the file blacklist.txt does and what it does not do.
Contents
History and Rationale
To achieve a fully libre mirror of ArchLinux, we needed to sync every package but filter put the non-libre ones. We decided to make a blacklist of these non-libre packages and put it in a single plain text file, which would serve as an exclusion list for the rsync script.
Some of us took the job of identifying non-libre packages by their licenses and/or license conflicts, and we finished it with joy :-P .
Uses
blacklist.txt contains the $pkgname (package names) of non-libre packages that are on Arch Linux's repos but shouldn't be on ours. Take note some of them are replaced by ours when we can find a libre replacement (i.e. kernel26 => kernel26-libre, firefox => icecat).
Why is kernel26 blacklisted?
Because the vanilla Linux comes with a lot of firmware blobs inside its source code. You can read the Linux-libre web site for more information.
Why is grub blacklisted?
To rebrand it and remove the Windows bootup config from the configuration file.