Summary/Minutes from today's FESCo Meeting (2015-10-07)

[Kevin Kofler]

Adam Jackson wrote:
> Bundling is _not_ intrinsically poor practice.  Firefox is a good
> example of this,

Firefox is exactly an example of how NOT to do things, and I'm fed up of it 
getting a blanket exception to our packaging guidelines. And now the "fix" 
is to simply remove the guideline for all packages. :-(

I haven't checked recently, but last I checked, Debian unbundled a lot more 
libraries from Firefox than we did, even where upstream explicitly "did not 
allow" it. (They opted to not use the trademark anyway, so they are only 
bound by the Free Software license, that of course allows unbundling 
whatever they want.) One example is libpng, where Firefox requires the non-
upstream APNG patch. Debian simply ripped out APNG support from Iceweasel to 
build it against the system libpng. (Though in this case, IMHO, the best fix 
would be to simply apply the APNG patch to the system libpng and ignore the 
libpng upstream's opinion. Then all browsers could benefit from APNG 
support. Some distros do that, too.)

        Kevin Kofler