Opinions welcome: Restructuring the system menus

Christopher Brown snecklifter at gmail.com
Mon Dec 17 16:42:09 UTC 2007


On 17/12/2007, Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl> wrote:
> Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Nicu Buculei <nicu_fedora <at> nicubunu.ro> writes:
> >> There is one thing I personally would like to see about games and menu
> >> (and I expect it is not specs compliant): all unplayable the games
> >> because of no data available (needing the autodownloader to be run) in a
> >> separate menu, so I could ignore them easily in the Games Spin.
> >> Yeah, they cold move from that menu in the proper location once the data
> >> is available, but this is really a "pie in the sky" scenario.
> >
> > IMHO the right solution for this problem would be to ban autodownloader and
> > everything using it (or worse, requiring original proprietary and charged-for
> > game CDs) from the distribution. I see that tool as both an ugly kludge and a
> > way to circumvent Fedora's licensing requirements. It also sends the entirely
> > wrong message to upstream projects: before, it was "If you want to have your
> > game in Fedora, you have to fix your licensing.", now it's "We'll just hack
> > around it with autodownloader and ignore our Fedora Objectives entirely.". :-(
> > In addition, for data files where the license allows non-commercial
> > redistribution, it would IMHO be more user-friendly to have a fully-playable
> > package in rpmfusion non-free than an autodownloader hack in Fedora.
> >
>
> Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence, autodownloader is for the cases where
> upstream can not or will not change the license. For example when I started
> packaging bolzplatz2006 (fun game) I contacted upstream and the upstream
> project lead said they would fix the license of the datafiles, at the end
> however one of upstreams major contributers wouldn't play ball.
>
> To be more precise, atleast the following list of packages in Fedora is in
> Fedora because I negotiated an acceptable license with upstream, or fixed
> license issues by replacing troublesome parts, and that is the list which I
> remember right now, the real list is (much) longer:
>
> glew
> worminator
> maniadrive-music
> crystal-stacker
> crystal-stacker-themes
> alphabet-soup
> crack-attack
> TnL
>
> And that is not counting all the packages where I transcoded sound from
> troublesome formats to free formats and patched the code to be able to handle
> those free formats.
>
> How many license changes have _you_ negotiated recently?

Awesome work - I was about to d/l the games spin for my nephew to
tinker with (qv. shut him up) at xmas. However I simply don't agree
with "autodownloader is for the cases where upstream can not or will
not change the license". Thats a bit of a dodgy road to be headed
down. Is there any chance you will re-consider this for the next
release?

This is now completely OT so apologies - the only comment I would make
about the original topic is that the mix of System Tools and
Administration section is indeed bonkers I feel, as Jonathan pointed
out.

Cheers

-- 
Christopher Brown

http://www.chruz.com




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