Fedora Project, give me 20 Million Euros or Free EDA software

[Kevin Kofler]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 1. you ignore or turn a blind eye to many native package properties and
> to what packagers do in addition to producing rpm files

What's the point of a single-file noarch package containing some piece of
media you're dumping to a semi-arbitrary location of the filesystem
(hopefully an arbitrary subdirectory of /usr/share, otherwise you're also
violating the FHS)? Why can't the user just download that file?
Uninstalling it is as easy as removing the single file. I don't need my RPM
database to double as a browser cache. ;-)

And there are plenty of such files around even if we only count those under
acceptable licenses, Fedora's infrastructure does not scale to that many
files, also considering the size of most media files. Ship a few
CC-licensed movies and you'll make kde-l10n look small in comparison.
Multiply this by the number of such files you want to ship and we quickly
reach astronomical proportions. We cannot afford wasting our mirrors'
resources that way for content which does not need packaging in the first
place.

> 2. all your arguments apply in one form or another to a large part of
> what you consider "legitimate software", and you've been told so many
> times

The difference is that software *needs* to be packaged for it to install
cleanly. A font also needs it to some extent, which is why we're packaging
them (and fonts are 1. small to medium-sized, so they don't waste resources
that much, 2. often used by software, in fact several of the fonts now
getting packaged are getting packaged because they used to be shipped as
part of some software and 3. usable with the software in Fedora unlike OVM
which this thread was originally about). (So don't worry, I'm not
suggesting to stop packaging fonts, and in fact I don't think anybody was
seriously suggesting that.) Most content, on the other hand, is a
self-contained file, which just needs to be downloaded to be viewed, and
often not even that (-> streaming).

> 3. core+extras, autopackage, direct CPAN use are all (mild) forms of
> what you advocate and the project already decided not to go those ways

FWIW, I'm not a fan of Matthew's suggestion of a "content repo" either. In
fact I think it wouldn't scale any more than packaging everything in Fedora
would. We have such a repo already, it's called the World Wide Web. :-)
Trying to put it all on a single server or even server farm is madness.

The best we can do, really, is work with search engines to get filtering on
licenses more widely adopted. But we can't put the result of that filter
into a single repo, nobody has that much storage space and bandwidth.
(Well, maybe if you can get both archive.org (for storage space) and Akamai
(for bandwidth) on board, but even then I doubt it. ;-) )

> 4. but you don't really want to admit that, because you're only
> rationalising prejudices, and call for Fedora censorship of its
> community contributions to support them
> 
> 5. I don't have a cluestick big enough to hit you with, so I'll just
> continue to annoy you by contributing work you don't care about to the
> project

Can you please stop this kind of personal attacks? Insulting people is not
going to help you prove your point at all. Please argue to the facts, not
the person. (And I know you aren't targeting me. I don't care. It is
unacceptable no matter whom you are insulting.)

Oh, and I don't see how keeping mirror resource utilization finite
is "censorship".

        Kevin Kofler