Package Maintainers Flags policy

[Colin Walters]

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Ewan Mac Mahon <ewan at macmahon.me.uk> wrote:
>
> The problem with FreeCiv is that the only distinction between a city or
> unit of one nation and one of another is the flag[1], so there doesn't
> seem to be any simple way to remove them.

Hmm, right I forgot they're on the units too, I was just thinking of
the civilization selection screen.

Well, the fix for Freeciv might have to be that civilizations get
randomly assigned block colors.

> There's also the fact that FreeCiv in particular contains Tibet as a
> playable nation; even if the flag were removed, I don't think refering
> to the Tibetan nation would pass muster in China. That being the case
> we're either going to need to go a lot further than removing just flags,
> or accept that generic Fedora won't be 'China safe', in which case we
> might as well leave the flags alone.

Here's the problem though, there are some obvious gaps in the Freeciv
civilization list as I mentioned before.  Some of which would be
offensive to a large swath of the Western world, some which would be
extremely controversial in smaller areas of the world, etc.  What
happens if one of those items gets added to the civilization list
upstream?  (Do they have a policy?)

Actually let's be practical here and admit Freeciv is a pretty special
case.  The main thing we want to squash is things like flags in input
method selection which is very prominent in the UI, and flags in
bittorrent clients whose removal doesn't at all substantially affect
the operation of the software.

Maybe we need a flag in the RPM .spec to say "this package contains
geopolitical symbols" and mark all of Freeciv as that.