Fedora Tracker: Part Deux

[Brad Smith]

> So moving forward there is a choice to be made by the 3rd party
> repository community. Do they want to make it easier for the official
> project to link to them, by taking steps to work inside the
> non-technical limitations such as the DMCA that the official project
> must abide by. Or do they want to be completely free to package what
> they want how they want, paying no heed to the legal constraints FC must
> live under and thus having to always stay one Google search away from
> users finding any of your packages.  There are pros and cons for both
> sides of that decision. And more importantly what the widely used
> end-user community tools will look like will depend on what the
> consensus is in the 3rd party repo community.  There's really no point
> in trying to build something like this tracker into the main site, if
> most of the popular 3rd party repos can't be indexed because of the
> DMCA.  


This assumes that Tracker is going to be integrated into Fedora.org. As
nice an ego-stroke as that would be for me, the very reasons you point
out would seem to make keeping it as separate an entity as possible a
good idea. 

That is, unless developing a codified set of standards that all
repositories must meet before being indexed can be deemed both feasible
and in the best interest of the distribution. 

On the one hand, the more standards and lack of legal liability the
better.

On the other, this opens up a whole set of issues, not just of
determining an appropriate policy, but of enforcing said policy without
making it prohibitively difficult to be indexed. As much as I support
the standardization of QA practices etc between repos, Tracker's job is
to help bridge the gaps between repos, not throw up barriers to
inclusion.

Could the required policy be as simple as requiring a free/non-free
split, with Tracker not linking directly to non-free packages? What
about repos that don't have any non-free packages? How to tell the
difference between that sort of repo and one that has non-free packages,
but isn't differentiating? 

Are there any admins of third-party Repos on this list to provide
opinions on ability/willingness? If nobody gives me a good reason not to
at least solicit opinions on such a plan, I can take this part of the
discussion to the repo-coord list and get input from there. 

Then there's the issue of how much of all this is necessary. I realize
that covering one's butt is good and that for a company it's essential.
But I must wonder if enough is at stake over linking to mplayer et al to
justify implementing and enforcing a major and probably controversial
policy over it. Assuming I can procure some kind of official separation
between me/my work and Red Hat (short of getting fired=;) it may be best
just to move things overseas (assuming that would make a difference),
de-link packages if/when the rightful parties ask us to do so and then
be done with it. 

But I'm butting my head against the IANAL wall here. I'll see to
contacting someone more cluefull than myself about all this before
actually doing (or deciding not to do) anything. 

--Brad