@wheatdog, thanks for your PR! By analyzing the history of the files in this pull request, we identified @zimbatm, @zraexy and @vcunat to be potential reviewers.

It seems that the license is not free. Below the download link, on can read:

These files are free to download and use from damieng.com but CAN NOT be redistributed either by other web sites or be included in your package, download, product or source repository at this time.

So, how about changing the license to unfree?

@wheatdog Best thing is to just ask the author of the package to change the wording of what he said, because it's rather vague.

I believe it's clear that the font is non-redistributable and therefore unfree. I think it can be included in nixpkgs, with licenses.unfree.

@wheatdog, if you squash those two commits, the PR will be ready to be merged.

However, I am not sure if the license allows redistributing this font, as Hydra will inevitably package it and provide a binary package. Or is there a way to deactivate it for this one package? Maybe by setting preferLocalBuild?

@jfrankenau That's what the unfree is supposed to be for. Or are you saying that despite it being marked as unfree that it would still be built?

@0xABAB, ah I didn't know that setting unfree as a side effect would be prevent it from getting in the binary caches. Still so much to learn about NixOS. 😃

Some distros, e.g. one pseudo-fork, don't even allow unfree stuff into the main repo, typically for "ideological reasons" :-) If we distributed non-distributable packages, that could be quite a legal problem.

If we distributed non-distributable packages, that could be quite a legal problem.

That's why I wanted to make sure that this package is only built by the end user. And I realized that NixOS being source-based and only backed by binary caches is ideal for this kind of situation.

I am not sure how nixpkg handle unfree packages. Can someone point out some code or document that explaining the behavior when specifying licenses.unfree? Thanks 😄

@wheatdog: this, for example: http://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#sec-allow-unfree

@vcunat: thanks, what about the concern @jfrankenau mentioned? Will it be cached in binary form (by Hydra, maybe)?

Unfree packages aren't touched by Hydra, of course. Not even the redistributable ones ATM.

@wheatdog, another section in the Nixpkgs manual implies this: https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#sec-meta-license

OK, I'd push this with some nitpicks atop: 4227b49. Any other ideas?

@vcunat: Looks great, but why do you change the location of readme? Will it collide? The reason I put it that way is that terminus-font-ttf seems do the same thing.

Yes, if two packages define the same path, they will collide when getting linked into the same environment.

Merged to master and 17.03. I just switched unzip to nativeBuildInputs, which would only make a difference when cross-compiling...