Package Maintainers Flags policy

James M. Leddy jleddy at redhat.com
Thu May 21 17:14:05 UTC 2009


On 05/18/2009 11:45 AM, Jerry James wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Kevin Fenzi<kevin at scrye.com>  wrote:
>> In FESCo's 2009-03-28 meeting a policy on Flag usage for packages in
>> Fedora was approved.
>>
>> Due to an oversight, this policy was not announced here. ;(
>>
>> Please see:
>>
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_Maintainers_Flags_Policy
>>
>> and direct any comments to FESCo in a ticket or via the devel list.
>>
>> Thanks, and sorry for the oversight. ;(
>>
>> kevin

This policy tries to please everyone and in the end pleases no one. 
There are two possibilities:

A) You cannot display certain flags in your country
B) You are free to display whichever country flags you want

In the first case (read China), you can't use fedora because it 
includes -flag packages.  Are we going to make a separate yum repo for 
-flag as well?  It's more likely that countries like these already 
roll their own distros anyway.  After all, it's free software.  If you 
don't like it, change it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux

In the second case, you create a lot more work for volunteers and 
raise the ire of -devel-list (see 15k posts above this).  Sure, there 
was a debian developer that quit because the RoC flag didn't get 
cleaned from the repo.  The questions that still has yet to be asked 
is, "How many volunteer maintainers didn't quit because of draconian 
packaging guidelines?"  I hope whomever makes the ultimate decision 
keeps this in mind.

-- 
James M. Leddy




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