I was re-reading the third party software policy (and also the FESCo ticket: https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1617#comment:10), and happened to notice that it looks like WGs are currently intended to be the final arbiters of what repositories are and are not allowed to be included in particular Fedora editions, particularly this comment:

"The submission process is edition-based. Acceptance into Fedora Workstation, for instance, does not guarantee your software will be as easily available in another Fedora Edition or in a Fedora Spin. It is up to each working group or special interest groups how to make available any software in their system."

I realize I'm a little late to bring this up, but this seems potentially concerning if, say, the Workstation and Server WGs both want to include a third party repository that packages the same software but differently. This would then potentially make the editions incompatible, which doesn't seem ideal.

Perhaps this is an implementation detail to be worked out, but as it's not otherwise mentioned in the policy... it seems like in the interests of standardization it would be better if a single group (FESCo? perhaps another WG dedicated to this purpose?) were the final arbiter of whether or not a third party repository could be included in the distribution at all, and then it would be up to the WGs to decide if and how to ship it. Or, at the very least, if a single group had some oversight over the entire process even if they did not have to approve each and every third party repository themselves.

Skimming through the discussion on the subject it didn't seem like this point seemed controversial to anyone else. So maybe other people have already thought about this and decided it's not a big deal. But I figured it couldn't hurt to ask.

Ben Rosser