Package Maintainers Flags policy

Denis Leroy denis at poolshark.org
Wed May 20 21:51:17 UTC 2009


On 05/20/2009 03:57 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> There are places where the use of certain flags is verboten; in this case,
> the use&  distribution of Fedora would be verboten if it prominently
> used them.

Right, we all know that, although it is not a problem *today* (as in, 
it's blocking F-11). But I don't see how this is related to Spot's 
proposal.

Promoting Fedora in China is a worthy goal of course. Now if we decide 
to tackle that challenge today, for whatever reason, and we lock up our 
brightest minds in a room and ask them to come out with a plan for that 
specific purpose, do you think they'll come out with a policy about 
isolating flags in subpackages ? No, they'll most likely come up with 
some grand master plan about creating a community of Chinese Fedora 
enthusiasts, creating their own SIG and PRC Fedora spin (I don't 
necessarily mean official SIG or spins), which most likely will 
black-list some packages, alter the default install, i18n params and 
comps files, and possibly, on a case-by-case basis, ask some packagers 
to split some packages in part to make their work possible. That's the 
way to go, and Fedora keeps a completely neutral stance in this. Any 
international community can do the same, for whatever political agenda 
they may have. That's the beauty of FOSS.

Or maybe their plan will be to create an "International" Fedora spin (or 
call it "Export", or "Flagless", or ...), which is a flavour of Fedora 
minus lots of content considered offending or illegal in a bunch of 
countries. Now of course, you need volunteers to work that spin. Such 
that, if someone complains about some offending flag, you can answer 
"Why, thank you for raising this issue! We are precisely looking for 
volunteers to help us create your own special flavour of Fedora!".

Now, back to Spot's proposal. It does not address any sort of focused 
and pragmatic problem we have today. Want Fedora to be <country 
X>-friendly ? Great, but first start by designing grand master plan 
above. Moving US, French and German flags into a bunch of secret 
subpackages doesn't buy you anything.




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