Fedora meeting Mono Half-Way

[John Morris]

On Mon, 2005-12-19 at 02:01, Paul F. Johnson wrote:

> Nope. No flags. Nothing. rpm purity. If you had that sort of thing in
> there, you could equally have the flag in to support mp3 on xmms, mpegs
> for Totem and all the other bits Red Hat have played it safe on.

I wouldn't have a problem with that either.  For example, RedHat ships
xmms with a modified tarball to outright remove the code to support mp3,
which violates the pristine source principle, but the law is the law. 
However, the .spec has everything needed and will happily build mp3
support if you insert the pristine source back in.  MP3 support is
illegal in the US but isn't in many other jurisdictions so making it
easy for those places to get it working makes sense.

More to the point with mono though is the precedent set with Java.  Long
before gcj was developed enough to build the java support for various
packages RedHat was shipping *-java packages.  In this case all I was
proposing was that if those who care deeply about mono contribute the
extra bits so that a .spec can support a build time switch to allow a
-mono package to pop out it might not be a bad thing to have in the
mainline instead pushing the whole package into a fork.

But let me be clear, I would object to Fedora actually shipping a single
-mono package because it would make mono a build requirement and mono is
DANGEROUS[1]. 

[1] Dangerous needs to be in bold and blinking but I only send ascii so
use your imagination.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris     This post is 100% M$Free!
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