xulrunner 2.0 in rawhide (F15) bundles several system libs

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Wed Oct 13 21:52:33 UTC 2010


Matej Cepl wrote:
> No need to call it “political reasons” (on the side of MoFo) ... nowhere
> in the definition of free software is written, that upstream has to
> accept your patches. It may happen upstream (any upstream) disagrees with
> your patch, you may not agree with them, but in the end it is their
> decision and if you don't agree you can either suck it up or fork. Both
> alternatives are still freely open for you (and Fedora as whole) in MoFo
> case as well (just to make this clear).

With any other upstream, we can just patch it in Fedora if upstream rejects 
the patch. Mozilla is abusing trademark law to prevent us from doing that, 
making the package effectively unmaintainable in the distribution, and 
leaving a rename as the only reasonable solution.

> If there is any political reason, then it is Fedora/RH policy to oblige
> with upstream trademark terms and to keep our Firefox/Thunderbird/
> XULRunner as close to the upstream as possible to save us work
> maintaining our patches and not go Iceweasel way.

No. It is Fedora's policy for all packages to follow Fedora guidelines, even 
where they conflict with upstream. Staying close to upstream is only one of 
the SHOULD guidelines and as such NEVER trumps MUST guidelines such as no 
bundled libs.

        Kevin Kofler



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