The Scope and Ownership of fedora-list

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Thu Aug 28 18:28:26 UTC 2008


Alan Cox wrote:
>> _AND_ keep in mind that this has next-to-nothing to do with Nvidia or 
>> other vendor-provided drivers, commercial software (even free - in the 
> 
> Nvidia is a rather different case.

Not from the perspective of new users who have to re-configure their yum 
repositories to include an unmentionable site.

>> original sense - stuff like VMware, flash, realplayer), or how to 
>> install Sun Java, yet they are all equally shunned subjects in official 
>> channels.  That is their right, of course, but it means that fedora 
> 
> If they are "shunned" in official channels then how come there is a
> libflashsupport package.

If it isn't shunned, why doesn't the adobe repository come 
pre-configured in yum?  Or at least as a '--release' rpm that could be 
installed from an official site by feeding the URL to rpm?

> Clearly this URL is a figment of my imagination
> too:  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JavaFAQ

There's nothing on that page that would enable a new user to install a 
copy of Sun Java.  That's slightly less important in f9 than it used to 
be but there are still plenty of things that won't work with openjdk.

> I think you need to take your anti-paranoia tablets.

How many new users do you know that managed to get Sun Java and its 
browser plugin working correctly on fedora without using something like 
the K12LTSP spin?  And how many did it following instructions provided 
by anyone related to fedora?  Java has probably been worse than the 
other cases where anti-competitive spin regarding the included less 
functional versions was overwhelmingly provided instead of any help at 
installing what a user really needs to run existing java applications - 
even when other distributions made it a stock package.

But the point I'm trying to make is that whether you interpret the 
missing information as legal constraints or 
political/business/philosophical agendas or just lack of time, it 
doesn't have to stop new users from finding it.  It would just be nicer 
if there were some less-constrained, non-official, non-US site hosting a 
wiki to organize it (and perhaps those --release rpms to set up the 
missing yum repos).

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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