fesco

#1476 Revisit our packaging policy on copied code
Closed Opened by rishi.

Closed
Reopen Issue

This is mostly triggered by the recent Darktable issue:
https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1475

There is enough prior art and precedence of projects sharing ad-hoc code by essentially copying it over into their repositories / tarballs:

  • libgd: experimental gtk+ widgets and hacks shared by various applications that sometimes make their way into gtk+ proper

  • telepathy-account-widgets: bunch of gtk+ widgets to let you create/modify a telepathy account shared between empathy and gnome-online-accounts

  • gnome-control-center and gnome-settings-daemon share random code that is copied over from time to time

  • I have seen atleast a dozen gtk+ widgets (like the floating status bar in nautilus / epiphany) copied all over the place.

  • Other ad hoc code for dealing with email addresses, UTF-8 strings, etc..

I spend most of my time working on GNOME and its surrounding eco-system, so my examples are biased in that direction, but I am sure there are plenty more.

Therefore, I don't think it is a reasonable policy to kick a package out of the distribution just because we found some instances of copied code. The reasonable thing to do would be ask if the code in question is a fork of some well-established shared library that is already part of the distribution. eg., bundling gtk+, qt or openssl could be a valid problem. But we shouldn't be telling people that they can't copy around random pieces of free software.

I think we should revisit our packaging policy on copied code.

Other relevant links related to the specific Darktable issue, since that was the original trigger:
https://github.com/klauspost/rawspeed/issues/109#issuecomment-126295602
https://fedorahosted.org/fpc/ticket/550#comment:2

Relevant discussion:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2015-September/214262.html

Is there a proposal here or should we discuss at a meeting (there's no meeting keyword)?

I see darktable was retired on 9th Sept. and next day FPC granted temporary exception for F23/F24 releases. So the darktable package is added back in Fedora on 10th Sept.

Now we have new packaging policy for bundling libraries as per https://fedorahosted.org/fesco/ticket/1483#comment:17 which can be followed for darktable as well.

Also I see FPC decided to follow what FESCo approved yesterday.

I am closing this ticket. If there is still some issues pending to be addressed then reopen this ticket with required information.
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