Sven Lankes wrote:
I'm not worried too much about a library being system or not. What I'm worried about is twofold:
- Established packagers of high-profile packages get to do what they want with fedora packages while small-scale packagers of low-profile packages get told to bugger off if they cannot make their packages use system libs (zsync anyone?).
+1
I really don't see why we keep exempting Firefox from our rules.
Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I can see none of the chosen ff comitters has actually asked fesco to grant an exception for libvpx, right? Now that the topic has come up there is talk in the ticket that the exception should be granted but that cannot feel right to anyone, can it?
And indeed, the fact that this is only being brought to the responsible committee (FESCo) after the fact is also unacceptable.
- The combination of the Mozilla Trademark issue combined with the strict handling of patches by (corporate|distro)-maintainers (I don't think that this is a RH/Fedora issue - same with Canonical/Ubuntu) makes me feel uneasy about ff being called Free sofware.
Indeed, Firefox is effectively non-Free for Fedora, since we're being kept hostage of their patch approval processes, and since our maintainer has a conflict of interest and values Mozilla's policies above Fedora's.
(And yes - I am aware that the other relevant floss-browser is much worse than mozilla wrt. bundling libs and using forked libs).
(Hey, don't insinuate that Konqueror is irrelevant!)
Chromium is not in Fedora for exactly that reason. Why does Firefox get a free pass?
Also the bug is not about _using_ the system lib it's just about allowing the user to build against it.
Indeed. And this is a core part of freedom.
Plus, the end user isn't going to build Firefox himself. It's going to be built by a packager who knows what he's doing when building against the system library, and the distribution also controls that library. So I really don't see why Mozilla refuses to allow it.
From Mozilla's perspective, they could:
- Do what they are doing now, temporarily not allow a few new
system libs, waiting until they get banged into shape and *then* enable system libs (down the road). 2. Bang on the code in private and wait until it meets every Fedora packaging guideline, etc, until committing to the upstream repository, so we all get to wait for all of the cool shit that's happening.
- Add the patch to their system that would allow people to build
against a system lib.
+1
Kevin Kofler