I must be doing something seriously wrong...

Bill Nottingham notting at redhat.com
Thu May 21 20:38:36 UTC 2009


Adam Williamson (awilliam at redhat.com) said: 
> > 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.
> 
> I don't think they're missing the point, as they raise valid problems
> with your categorization. I don't agree with your 'Benefit', for the
> following reasons:
> 
> 1: a lot of that 1/6th of the world's population does not own a
> computer. Or an internet connection. (Or, in many cases, a reliable
> electricity supply). Let's not have any illusions about China: it
> contains a huge amount of people, but a rather smaller amount of
> possible potential Fedora users.

You could say that about many countries. In any case, even if 1/10 of one
percent of those people are viable users... that still dwarfs the affected
packager base by many orders of magnitude.

> 1a: Fedora is not, in point of practical reality, unavailable to China
> at present. Even if, by official Chinese government policy, Fedora
> contains material that should not be distributed in China, it has been
> reported that - in practice - it is perfectly possible to download
> Fedora in China from many different mirrors, flags and all.

Possible? Sure. It doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to
knowingly provide software to people that can get them in trouble
with their local authorities.

> 2: it has not by any means been established that solely removing flags
> from the distribution would be sufficient for the Chinese government to
> be happy with Fedora being actively promoted / distributed within China.

Given that related operating systems with *ONLY* these changes are allowed,
it's a fair assumption to make. Honestly, I think the proof is on others
that it wouldn't be enough, given that existing evidence points to
the positive.

> 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.

Proliferation of spins and maintenance for specific geographies is
a waste of space and effort, if it can be avoided. That's why we
have languages included on the Desktop spin, instead of 15 different
localized ones.

Bill




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