Fixing the glibc adobe flash incompatibility

[François Cami]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 9:21 PM, Magnus Glantz <mg at hacka.net> wrote:
> On 11/17/2010 09:09 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Bruno Wolff III<bruno at wolff.to>  wrote:
>>> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 08:57:20 +0100,
>>>   Hans de Goede<hdegoede at redhat.com>  wrote:
>>>>
>>>> For those who do not know it yet, recent Fedora glibc updates include
>>>> an optimized memcpy (which gets used on some processors) which breaks the
>>>> 64 bit adobe flash plugin.
>>> I saw memcpy / memmove issues affecting squashfs-tools shortly before the
>>> F14 alpha. So we had some what of a heads up about the issue over three
>>> months ago. It is unfortunate that we didn't catch the flash issue during
>>> prerelease testing of F14. If this really is an important critera for
>>> releases, maybe we should be having QA testing that flash works.
>> I will be very, very, disappointed if that gets added as a criteria
>> for a Fedora release.  It would be no different than making sure the
>> nvidia driver works, and we certainly shouldn't be doing that either.
>
> I can relate to that. I'm all for pure open source, but..
>
> I really can't see why it would be a bad thing Fedora would do QA on a
> proprietary software that is very important for a majority of the Fedora
> users.
> If we'd have an open source flash player that almost everyone could run
> as a substitute, then it would be a different situation. I would say
> that is the case regarding Nvidia.

IIRC broken proprietary drivers never stopped us from shipping, but I
could be wrong.

Furthermore, no proprietary software vendor supports Fedora timely and
fixes for issues like this one take months (from their own estimate).
So by making sure proprietary software works, we could break the
"First" Foundation.

I would also argue we would break the "Freedom" Foundation, because
proprietary software may limit what Fedora can do.

On the other hand, proprietary software-related bugs found before the
release would probably receive some attention (and could be forwarded
to the vendor accordingly), so anyone is free to test whatever they
use and file bugs.

I am not saying that we should refrain users from testing proprietary
software - but we should not make it part of the release criteria.

François