Summary/Minutes for today's FESCo meeting (2010-10-05)

[Brandon Lozza]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 5:45 PM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> There was also talk about whether or not it would be allowed for there
>> to be a separate Iceweasel package in Fedora. This might be done to
>> test the feasibility of maintaining it. There were mixed feelings about
>> this amoung FESCO.
>
> This is essentially not feasible because most of the disputed patches are in
> xulrunner, and a hypothetical separate Iceweasel package would share
> xulrunner with Firefox, unless we have even more bundled libraries.
>
> I also don't see what we have to gain from shipping both.
>
> So it's really an either-or situation.
>
> IMHO, the version which is not compliant with our guidelines needs to go
> away, period. We need to stop treating Mozilla specially, it needs to be
> held by the same rules as any other upstream. If they don't cooperate, it's
> the maintainer's job to fix things or orphan it. If nobody picks it up when
> orphaned, it should be retired like any other package. Firefox is NOT an
> essential package, the GNOME spin could just ship Epiphany (GNOME's default
> browser) instead, and other desktop spins ALREADY ship the respective
> desktop's default instead of Firefox!
>
>        Kevin Kofler
>
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It doesn't help when a majority of voting FESCo members are biased
Firefox users who seem to hate the idea of Iceweasel (based on what I
gather from their meeting notes). There seem to be some preconceptions
about what happens when you remove the branding. No conclusive data
can be provided to indicate how much users Firefox brings the distro.

I also don't appreciate the comment at the meeting about "non
contributing" members on the mailing list complaining about this
issue. It's an argument often used to ignore people with valid
arguments who also don't happen to have a computer science degree.
Some of us advocate Fedora and that in itself is a contribution.
Fedora consists of volunteers in many areas, not all of them make
packages or write code.