package submission policy question

[Michael A. Peters]

A private e-mail from a packager I highly respect expressed some
concerns relating to two package I requested for review

sword (and by extension gnomesword)

The concern was two-fold:

1) the nature of the software could be seen as religious
efforts/campaigns

2) the title of the software, sword, could invoke negative reactions
from some people

I would like these issues clarified with respect to Fedora Extra policy,
as I am sure that as the Fedora community grows, other people will want
to submit similar software.

A little background - in Fedora Core 3, the previous version of sword
and gnomesword did not work because the gnome libraries in core 3 were
too new. On my private yum repository, I built two compatibility
packages needed to allow gnomesword to build, and offered them for
Fedora Core 3. The only package in my repository that got more downloads
was my build of gstreamer-ffmpeg. There definitely is a demand for this
software.

Last week, a new stable version of sword and gnomesword were released,
and compatibility libraries are no longer needed for gnomesword, hence
my submission.

Neither software package installs any biblical texts, those are to be
installed by the user - typically in the users home directory, from a
repository of modules that does respect the intellectual property rights
of the copyright holders.

Both projects are primarily developed by christians, and yes - I also am
a christian, but the software is not useful only to the christian
community. It is also useful to the scholarship community in general.
There are modules for greek and hebrew and latin for those studying the
texts in the old languages, as well as modules for general books -
including the complete works of Josephus, quite useful to anyone
studying 1st century palestine. None of the packages install any
religious texts, they simply install the software needed to make use of
texts that the user chooses to install.

With respect to the name "sword" there is nothing I can do about that,
that's the upstream name. It refers to the Bible as being the sword of
truth, it is not used to indicate any kind of violent intentions.

These packages are not suitable for rpm.livna.org, extras is imho the
place for them. If there is to be a policy that excludes these kind of
packages from extras, I would like it discussed and defined so that a
repository similar to rpm.livna.org but for packages that can be
perceived as religious/political could be set up such packages (of
course not being particular to any one religion or philosophy or
political viewpoint)

It should be noted that sword and gnomesword (and I believe the kde
interface bibletime) are in debian sarge (and I think woody) and are
also in the mandrake equivalent of extras. I know they don't set fedora
packaging policy, but to my knowledge, there have been no issues with
the name sword and the nature of the software with those distributions.

At any rate, I would like this clarified if possible.