Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:58:30 +0100 (CET), Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> >> Nope. You intentionally keep confusing the [...]
> >
> > I disagree, and I see we don't discuss the same things.
> > Perhaps you're on a mission.
> 
> No more than you are.

Still I don't presume so much.

> Very reasonable so far.
> 
> > What I do care about is that the Linux distribution is not subverted
> > with languages and glyphs I don't understand or can't display. I also
> > very much care about the project language that is used on the primary
> > mailing-lists, for example.
> 
> Here you take a massive leap into paranoïa land. Most what-if horror
> cases advanced in this thread already occurred, and the distribution
> was not subverted, the project primary language didn't change, in fact
> it was all so little invasive it wasn't noticed at all.

It's no secret that the review guidelines are incomplete/imperfect.
Stuff can slip through until it is discovered.
 
> So I don't follow you. The evidence seems to be we cope with UTF-8 &
> non-English pretty well.

Do you have more examples of UTF-8 package names in Fedora (without that I
need to script a srpm/spec checker)?

> > So, the system is not ready yet, which is a blocker criterion as I
> > pointed out before.
> 
> The system is never ready. This is IT. There are problems, they get
> fixed, and we don't wait for the perfect system before ack-ing a
> roadmap.

"Not ready yet" and "roadmap" are close to eachother. Let's imagine we
didn't have UTF-8 filesystems already. That would be an example of "not
ready yet" for UTF-8 package file names. Instead, we see that some
multi-byte encoded file names display as "garbage" in default
installations (text-mode as well as GUIs). That's the current case of "not
ready yet" for permitting arbitrary package file names. Is that more
comprehensible?

> >> >> We already ship lots of code commented in other languages than
> >> >> English
> >> >> (for example, OO.o IIRC) so this ship also sailed a long time
> >> ago.
> >> >
> >> > That's still only due to its Star Office history, isn't it?
> >>
> >> No.
> >>
> >> That's due to the fact Fedora is a *distribution*, built from [...]
> >
> > When Star Division developed the closed-source Star Office, Fedora
> > did not even exist.
> 
> So? We ship a lot of stuff developped before Fedora existed. And not
> only in historic packages. And I've not such an inflated view of
> Fedora to believe Fedora existing or not would have changed the
> slightest bit in the situation.

No further comment other than pointing out that OO.o's primary
project website is in English. You argue and argue and argue, and
I don't want to be dragged down that road.