F22 Self Contained Change: Disabled Repositories Support

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 03/18/2015 05:46 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
>
> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 12:21 PM, Mike Pinkerton  wrote:
>
>
>     What I don't understand is the wisdom of an official Fedora
>     "product" endorsing a copr when either the software or packaging (or
>     both) is not of sufficient quality to make it into the official
>     Fedora repo.
>
>
> I don't think of it as a endorsement.
I see them as a means of discouraging people from packaging for Fedora:

Ask yourself: "Why should I package a package properly, when I can get 
off 'cheap'?" - msuchy's rationale is along this line.

> It is making them more easily
> discoverable but there is going to be a prompt of some sort that warns
> them of the nature of such software and users get to choose whether they
> are willing to accept that tradeoff for immediate access.  One might
> choose to use say, Chromium regardless of the bundling issues for example.

There are many more ways why a package not to be eligible for Fedora 
than "bundling":
- Illegal/patent-encumbered in the US, but legal to distribute in other 
countries.
- Legal to distribute binaries, repackaged for "packager lazyness", 
(e.g. Java) or complexity (foreign arch binaries needed to support 
cross-toolchains).
- Content-only packages (Videos, Audiofiles).
- Packages with ethical/political controversial contents.
...

In other words, if you are really serious about this plan, you need some 
authority to continuously review the packages in such "endorsed" repos, 
technically, legally and "politically".


Ralf