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

[Bastien Nocera]

----- Original Message -----
> 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.)

Because adding downstream features to a system library really is the way to
keep ABI (not). We wouldn't even be able to use Ubuntu binaries in Fedora.