Package Maintainers Flags policy

[Kevin Kofler]

Bastien Nocera wrote:
> (I didn't even read the policy, but I guess it's the same one we had
> arguments over in GNOME 6 years ago, and a bit before that in RH
> itself).

On the other hand, KDE upstream explicitly decided NOT to ban flags, as they
consider banning flags to be a political move and to go against KDE's
principle of political neutrality. Some involved also considered it a free
speech issue. (Sorry, this is from memory, I can't find the old ML link
right now.)

And FYI, the current policy doesn't ban flags entirely, but they have to be
in a -flags package which is not installed by default (this is now
implemented for kdebase-runtime, it has a kdebase-runtime-flags subpackage;
before that, flags used to be removed from kdebase-runtime entirely, as per
the old unwritten policy, the current one is a compromise).

It shall be noted that many users complained about flags being removed (they
expect the keyboard layout chooser to use them), and the current solution
where -flags is optional and not installed by default isn't very helpful
either (but better than not having them at all).

        Kevin Kofler