I must be doing something seriously wrong...

Christoph Wickert christoph.wickert at googlemail.com
Thu May 21 12:20:52 UTC 2009


Josh,

first of all I'd like to thank you for taking the time to answer my
question. I really appreciate it.

On Thu, 2009-05-21 at 07:31 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 12:14:03PM +0200, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> [snipped]
> >meeting minutes? If 8 out of 21 summaries are missing, IMHO this is a
> >fact worth mentioning.
> 
> They are missing because the minutes are done by FESCo members themselves and
> we are humans.  That isn't to say that the minutes aren't important, but that
> people make mistakes and are busy and at times, things get missed.  The IRC
> logs for almost all the meetings should be available though.

Yes, but without the meeting minutes people might not even know there
was a FESCo meeting, e. g. if it was an irregular one. FESCo cannot
expect people to check for new logs every day just to be on the safe
side.

> Earlier in the year we tried a rotation of minutes takers to alleviate the
> burden on one person, but that seems to have failed.  If someone wanted to
> volunteer to be the FESCo secretary, I'm sure we would welcome that.

I don't think FESCo needs a secretary. Being a FESCo member gives you
privileges, so one should also pull his duties. If not,  IMHO the person
is not qualified for FESCo, simple as that. (Sorry if this sounds harsh)

> >I'm one of the few maintainers who directly is affected by the policy.
> >Would somebody - preferably a FESCo member, who voted for the flags
> >proposal - please be so kind to answer my questions. TIA!
> 
> >https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-May/msg01414.html
> 
> 1) The rationale was given by spot here:
> 
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-May/msg01427.html
> 
> or was that not what you were looking for?

Not really. Spot just explained the rationale for writing the policy,
but as I already outlined that the policy does not cover all the cases
it was designed for. Maybe I should have asked more precisely: What is
the use of a policy that does not really solve the problems?

> 2) The advantage for the project was to codify something that has been
> dealt with silently since the RHL days.  That being said, the guideline itself
> is going to be revisited.

I agree that codification is a good thing, but I really don't see the
benefit (see above) and your answer does not solve the apparent
contradiction between "follow upstream" and "remove flags". We have two
conflicting guidelines here, so which one is more important?

> 3) Your example of keyboard layout selection seems akin to language selection.
> In my opinion, under the existing guideline, the flags would not be allowed but
> you could ask FESCo for an exemption.  Note, that is just my opinion and I don't
> speak for FESCo as a whole.

Ok, then please some FESCo members please speak up.

> 4) This is a good question.  If you have specific examples of things that are
> not obviously 'religion' that you would like to have evaluated that might help.

How about Scientology, is it a religion? I don't think so, but I know
there are people who see this differently, especially in the US. Also
you only answered my question partly, I asked for a definition of an
"ethnocultural concept". Even the assumed trivial terms are hard to
define. What is "country"? Is Tibet one or Taiwan?

> 5) I don't know the answer to your question, nor do I find it relevant in a
> discussion about flags.  It's been pointed out several times that the flags
> policy opens doors to madness through defining 'acceptable' content, so let's
> not start yet another massive thread about that at the moment.

I do think it is relevant. The policy deals with religious flags, but it
does not deal with religions symbols. I could draw a square around
symbol and call it a flag.

> 6) How do you make sure users are aware of -docs packages, or -devel packages?
> I see no difference here.

I do. -devel packages for example show up in comps and can be installed
with groupinstall, but -flags can't. While developing or building a
package you will most likely be pointed to a missing -devel package by a
configure script or a failed make, but what will point you to the
missing flags?
Docs don't affect runtime of a program (as per packaging guidelines),
but flags do. Not necessarily the fundamental functions of a package,
but they *do* make the program behave differently than intended by it's
developers. Just take deluge or my xfce4-xkp-plugin as examples.

> 7) As FESCo for an exemption under the current guideline.

Will do.

Regards,
Christoph





More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list