Adam Williamson (awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx) said: > > Benefits: > > - allows roughly 1/6 of the world's population to use Fedora freely > > > > Demerits: > > - requires ongoing maintenance work on some packages > > - may require removing packages that can't comply without being broken > > > > I feel the benefits in this case outweigh the demerits, and the > > amount of work required to be greatly exaggerated. Furthermore, > > making Fedora available for all to use freely is a fundamental > > goal of the project; ensuring the presence of, say, gcompris in > > a form that exactly matches upstream is much lower down the totem > > pole.[2] > > > Now, if we can discuss the benefits and demerits without resorting > > to reducuing it to 'aah! slippery slope' or 'I'm offended by > > yellow, take that out too!', it would help, as those are sort > > of missing the point. > > I don't think they're missing the point, as they raise valid problems > with your categorization. I don't agree with your 'Benefit', for the > following reasons: > > 1: a lot of that 1/6th of the world's population does not own a > computer. Or an internet connection. (Or, in many cases, a reliable > electricity supply). Let's not have any illusions about China: it > contains a huge amount of people, but a rather smaller amount of > possible potential Fedora users. You could say that about many countries. In any case, even if 1/10 of one percent of those people are viable users... that still dwarfs the affected packager base by many orders of magnitude. > 1a: Fedora is not, in point of practical reality, unavailable to China > at present. Even if, by official Chinese government policy, Fedora > contains material that should not be distributed in China, it has been > reported that - in practice - it is perfectly possible to download > Fedora in China from many different mirrors, flags and all. Possible? Sure. It doesn't mean it's necessarily a good idea to knowingly provide software to people that can get them in trouble with their local authorities. > 2: it has not by any means been established that solely removing flags > from the distribution would be sufficient for the Chinese government to > be happy with Fedora being actively promoted / distributed within China. Given that related operating systems with *ONLY* these changes are allowed, it's a fair assumption to make. Honestly, I think the proof is on others that it wouldn't be enough, given that existing evidence points to the positive. > the best way to solve the problem. Other proposals have been made - such > as delegating the modification work to some kind of SIG, working on a > special spin of Fedora for China - and I haven't seen anyone explain why > that's a worse idea than making all the changes directly in the main > Fedora package repositories. Proliferation of spins and maintenance for specific geographies is a waste of space and effort, if it can be avoided. That's why we have languages included on the Desktop spin, instead of 15 different localized ones. Bill -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
