RPM submission procedure

Eric S. Raymond esr at thyrsus.com
Wed Jan 7 23:11:21 UTC 2004


Alan Cox <alan at redhat.com>:
> At least one is "maybe they don't want to be Fedora Extras" and another
> in several cases is that they choose to carry material that might not be
> allowed in the USA, just the free world. As a US corporation Red Hat is
> subject to US law.

These both seem like readily solvable problems to me. 

If you look at <http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/mega-merge.php>,
you'll see that this group describes itself as "The Red Hat/Fedora 
authoritative packager list".  That sure sounds to me as though they
would welcome official status if offered.

As for the DECSS problem, everybody understands it and we already
have a workaround via the existence of livna.org.  

I suggest that Fedora make the following offer to this group: Fedora
will put these repositories in the distributed apt.sources and
collectively designate them as Fedora Extras, on the following
conditions:

(1) Software compromised for IP reasons must be exiled to livna.org
    Repository keepers must agree to comply with a ban list compiled
    by Red Hat.

(2) RPMs must meet Fedora QA standards.  Repository maintainers must
    expect their submission, test and build procedures to be audited, 
    and will be dropped from the list of authoritative repositories if 
    they fail to meet standards.

I doubt you'd get any pushback on these requirements.  And the cost of 
QA-monitoring these repositories would undoubtedly be lower than the
cost of building and maintaining one big repository of your own.  You'd
win fairly big on the download costs alone.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>





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