Package Maintainers Flags policy

[Bill Nottingham]

Seth Vidal (skvidal at fedoraproject.org) said: 
>>>>> If we end up needing  yum plugin of some kind to handle this can I call
>>>>> it the free-randomstan plugin?
>>>>
>>>> We don't have a yum-patents plugin, or Provides(patents). Why are we
>>>> going to such lengths here?
>>>
>>> How would we have a Provides(patents) on pkgs in fedora? If the pkgs had
>>> patent issues we couldn't ship them at all, could we?
>>
>> What I'm saying is that in the amount of tossing around of ideas in this
>> thread, and the amount of work that would be required to sanely implement
>> this (and explain it in a way that makes sense to the users) we could
>> have fixed 99.9% of the packages to not ship flags about 5 times over.
>>
>
> I thought this thread was about explaining it in a way that our 
> developers understand it.

Which 'it' here are you referring to?

> I'm sorry you feel your time has been wasted.

I just feel that once you've gotten to the point where we have to define
packaging policies around magic provides, rel-eng checks to make sure that
packages with magic provides don't end up in specific places, and then
we may need special plugins to handle them... we've gone beyond reasonable
solutions to the problem, and solutions that probably outweigh in effort
and complexity the amount of work required to package things to just not
use flags.

Bill