debian-multimedia.org considered harmful - redux

[Andres Mejia]

On Apr 12, 2012 10:38 AM, "Fabian Greffrath" <fabian at greffrath.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Stefano,
>
> Am 12.04.2012 14:26, schrieb Stefano Zacchiroli:
>
>> I'd appreciate your feedback on it.
>
>
> thank you very much for the draft.

Same here, thank you.

> However, sadly, I doubt this will lead us anywhere. I do not believe that
Christian will ever change the domain name of his repository now that it is
that established - and I am not sure if this is really something we should
demand from him. So, IMHO, step (2) will never happen.

>From what I've seen, he only established debian-multimedia.org in 2006 (do
a whois on the site). There has been activity involving the Debian
Multimedia team since at least 2003, judging by the
debian-multimedia at l.d.omailing list. Seeing as it looks like he never
intended to join the team
anyway, he needs to change the name back to whatever he was using before
(he was on some site called nerim.net) or use some other name.

> OTOH, we have approached Christian several times before with words
similar to what you used in the draft. I don't expect that another approach
will change his mind and attitude regarding collaboration with us - and I
think that he knows himself quite well that the package duplication that he
introduces causes harm and pollutes the Debian package name space. That's
really nothing we we should need to educate him about at all.

I too tend to think Christian is well aware of what he's doing. He's a DD
afterall and he even maintained gnome packages back in 2002 (search for
"christian marillat once again").

> I think there are two other steps that we can demand from him:
>
> (1) There should be a clear statement/disclaimer on the d-m.o homepage
telling users that this is an unofficial repository that is not affiliated
to Debian in general and the pkg-multimedia team in particular and that
using packages from this repository is at own risk. A properly worded
disclaimer can be found e.g. on the medibuntu homepage.

Yes, whatever site he ends up using, it needs to be clear it's not
affiliated with Debian. Apparently, there are users out there that think it
is.

There are users who think dmo is needed for multimedia applications. I
think users who end up with this confusion are those that used RPM distros.
Fedora has RPM Fusion and OpenSUSE has Packman. In the cases of these
additional repositories, it's clear they are not a part of the distros they
provide an extension to. Dmo needs to do the same.

> (2) There should be a clarification on the homepage that the Donations
collected on the page are not targeted at Debian but only at d-m.o itself.
>
> These two claims are IMHO absolutely important!

Agreed, just like how it needs to be clear dmo is not a part of Debian, it
also needs to be clear donations towards dmo do not go towards Debian.

> Thanks again,
> Fabian
>
>
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