On Wed, 2004-03-30 at 10:37:12 -0500, Jef Spaleta wrote:
______________________________________________________________________
Brad Smith wrote:
> This assumes that Tracker is going to be integrated into
>
Fedora.org. As nice an ego-stroke as that would be for me, the very
> reasons you point out would seem to make keeping it as separate an
> entity as possible a good idea.
I think perhaps you misinterpreted what I was trying to say. Or perhaps
the fever I had yesterday affected my ability to communicate.
Looking back today at what Matt H. wrote, its pretty clear my feverish
state was affecting my comprehension. Matt H. was actually talking about
turning the tracker into a subproject of Fedora, to give it a homebase
for its development effort not necessarily incorporating it into the
main site's functionality, which is how i originally read it yesterday.
My main point being, as things stand, the potential usefulness of an
implementation of the tracker is anti-correlated to its potential
integration into official fedoraium functionality.
Yes, this anti-correlation is a shame for such a useful, needed
functionality. You are correct with your interpretation of my post; I
indeed would like to see a
http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/tracker
page for this project.
Once fedora extras opens up for contributors to use, i don't see
any
obvious problem with trying to use whatever hosting services Red Hat
eventually provides for contributors who have new community initiated
fedora related projects. We'll have to wait and see how things develop
on that front. There's nothing inherently problematic with the tracker
codebase really, the problems are very much associated with building the
repo index. While the codebase itself might fit into an expanded idea
of a community development model, any really useful implementation of
this out in the wild has to be totally independent. Though, there could
be some people like .edu's who might want to use something like the
tracker in their intranet. If the fedora project does host web pages
aimed at development of the tracker your still going to run into trouble
trying to provide links from those development pages to a fully indexed
demo.
Now, what ways can these legalities be dealt with to keep in line with
The Fedora Project's objectives? The underlying infrastructure is fine
as you mentioned, the issue is the with the content this infrastructure
interacts. I may be totally off-track here, but hosting a development
platform surely is different than hosting an implementation? Could this
not be the case for The Fedora Tracker Project? If we control what is
indexed, then development could continue as part of a Fedora
sub-project. i.e.
fedora.redhat.com could implement a
DMCA/Fedora-compliant implementation (albeit limited), while Brad's full
version could be hosted elsewhere. This probably defeats the purpose of
Brad's goals for the Tracker however and wouldn't be very practical..
> On the other, this opens up a whole set of issues, not just of
> determining an appropriate policy, but of enforcing said policy without
> making it prohibitively difficult to be indexed. As much as I support
> the standardization of QA practices etc between repos, Tracker's job is
> to help bridge the gaps between repos, not throw up barriers to
> inclusion.
This statement, unfortunately, proves that my idea above is more of a
pipe dream. :( Even if a DMCA/Fedora-compliant implementation were
possible, it could never be as functional as it should be; - "bridge the
gaps, not throw up barriers"..
Regards,
-Matt
--
Registered Linux User #348963 /
counter.li.org
GnuPG KeyID: 0xCE9F8922 /
gnupg.org