Package Maintainers Flags policy

Ewan Mac Mahon ewan at macmahon.me.uk
Tue May 19 13:56:40 UTC 2009


On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 12:32:25PM +0100, Peter Robinson wrote:
> >> Some trivial things offend some strange people, beyond all reason and
> >> proportion. It's just best for us to avoid shipping those things, unless
> >> the lack of them is a _real_ technical problem. Which it _isn't_, in the
> >> case of flags.
> >>
> >
> > It is for some packages. I can't see any sane way to package FreeCiv,
> > for example, without using flags. At that point, do we just accept the
> > package (Tibettan nation and flag and all) or drop perfectly good Free
> > software from the distribution?
> 
> As per the original posting you'd raise the issue with FESCO for their review.
> 
Which is a fine procedural answer, but doesn't really help unless we
have some idea of what their decision would be. I can only see a few
feasable outcomes:
- The package stays in, flags, and textual mentions of Tibettan
  nationhood intact. In which case Fedora is still not 'China safe'.
- The controversial flags are removed, others stay in, and FESCO have to
  make the call as to who's flags count as controversial.
- The flags are split out as per the policy, and the default install of
  FreeCiv is crippled for anyone that doesn't realise the -flags package
  exists.
- The whole package is dropped from Fedora.

There does seem to be an assumption in the acceptance of this policy
that flags are easily removed, and that's not always the case. It's easy
to say 'refer the hard cases to FESCO', but if the end result is that
the difficult cases just have their flags left in, then there seems
little point in going to the trouble of removing them from the easier
cases. Alternatively, if the end result is that hard cases just get
dropped from Fedora, then I think that's reasonable cause to object to
the policy.

Ewan
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