I must be doing something seriously wrong...

[Bill Nottingham]

> China is the elephant in the
> room, here. I agree with Christoph - this policy is essentially about
> China, and that needs to be openly and clearly discussed.

Sure. Honestly, I think the approved policy sort of sucks - it should
either be a full 'no flags except for specifc exceptions'[1], or
'hey, ship all the flags you like'. In between adds a lot of technical
apparatus that doesn't bring in much gain.

As I said, it's a trade-off between:

Benefits:
- allows roughly 1/6 of the world's population to use Fedora freely

Demerits:
- requires ongoing maintenance work on some packages
- may require removing packages that can't comply without being broken

I feel the benefits in this case outweigh the demerits, and the
amount of work required to be greatly exaggerated. Furthermore,
making Fedora available for all to use freely is a fundamental
goal of the project; ensuring the presence of, say, gcompris in
a form that exactly matches upstream is much lower down the totem
pole.[2]

Now, if we can discuss the benefits and demerits without resorting
to reducuing it to 'aah! slippery slope' or 'I'm offended by
yellow, take that out too!', it would help, as those are sort
of missing the point.

Bill

[1] I can see the argument for freeciv. I can't see the argument for
 someone using flags to pick languages, input methods, etc.

[2] In the same way that each packager's own preferred workflow does
 not override the needs of the project as a whole, neither does
 the upstream composition or use of any particlar package override
 the needs of the project as a whole. Sure, we may bend a little
 bit for the kernel...