I must be doing something seriously wrong...

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2009-05-21 at 12:29 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 4: even if we take it as a given that flags in Fedora are a problem
> for
> China, *and* are the only problem for China, *and* whatever policy we
> wind up with that involves changing the main set of official Fedora
> packages solves the problem, it has not been established that this is
> the best way to solve the problem. Other proposals have been made -
> such
> as delegating the modification work to some kind of SIG, working on a
> special spin of Fedora for China - and I haven't seen anyone explain
> why
> that's a worse idea than making all the changes directly in the main
> Fedora package repositories.

Given the above, here's my practical proposal, if we decided we really
wanted to go through with this:

* Those willing to make the effort to make significant ongoing changes
to Fedora packages to make it acceptable to the Chinese government
should form a SIG

* Members of that SIG should be granted co-maintainer status on affected
packages

* They (not the main maintainers) should adjust affected packages to
include a build-time conditional which adjusts the build to be
acceptable for China: for instance, for a flag issue, they would
introduce a --with-china build conditional which, when set to 1, would
patch out the flags

* They (the China SIG) should set up a separate repository for affected
packages; in this repository, the packages would be built with the China
build conditional set. In the official repositories, they would be built
without it, and hence would work exactly as if the China changes did not
exist

* They (the China SIG) would be responsible for producing custom spins
for each release, using the packages from the China repository

This has the advantage that it places no extra burden on regular
maintainers, and if the China changes break, it doesn't affect the main
Fedora repositories.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net