Package Maintainers Flags policy

David Woodhouse dwmw2 at infradead.org
Tue May 19 12:59:06 UTC 2009


On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 14:38 +0200, Denis Leroy wrote:
> On 05/19/2009 12:39 PM, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > I don't much like the reasons that we have to do it -- but I do agree
> > that it's best just to stay out of the political debate by not shipping
> > _any_ flags.
> 
> Will you also stay out of the profanity debate and blacklist all 
> packages contains any textual occurrence of a profane word ? Or ship 
> them in a separate "-adult" subpackage ? This is completely ridiculous, 
> and the fact you are a member of FeSCO is plain scary. This can only be 
> excused by lack of time and/or interest to think about a better solution.

I believe we do remove profanity where it's visible to the user, such as
in fortune files. We also removed the 'random image' screensaver, didn't
we?

I don't really _approve_ of those changes, just as I don't really
approve of removing flags. But it's not that I disagree with the Fedora
decision -- it's more that I disagree with the screwed-up society which
makes it necessary. I do reluctantly concede that it's the most
appropriate decision for Fedora. As did an overwhelming majority of my
colleagues on FESCo, iirc.
 
> Worst of all, this "policy" is forced on us, without any sort of valid 
> legal reason for it, or even chance for discussion on the mailing list. 

I'm sorry if that impression was given. I thought we actually postponed
the discussion and vote on it for a week so that it could get more
visibility -- do I misremember that?

And my understanding is that there _is_ a valid legal reason for it.
Distributing Fedora in some countries is _illegal_ if it contains
certain flags, and can lead to extremely uncomfortable repercussions.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation




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