On Mon, 3 Apr 2023 00:28:16 -0400 bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Apr 2023 04:35:42 +0200 Denis wrote: > > The issue is that "infrastructure which they control" is subject to > > different interpretations. > > i agree, that was to strong > > i really only mean that they should control what gets published, > and how it is built - the form of the infra, or who operates it, > is not essential In that case Parabola has this kind of control for instance: it controls what is published and since it can override packages too, it can change the way things are built by replacing the original distro packages with new packages of its own. Mirrors also work as the distribution can make a mirror not official anymore if they mess up. Guix is a bit special as the builder and repositories are the same thing. There is at least the same kind of controls than mirrors: the distro controls the package definitions or what is published in this way but it doesn't necessarily controls the specific infrastructure, so I guess that this works too. And if a distribution starts depending distributions like Debian main that might be fully free but that are not FSDG, so they can change policy along the way too, in ways that keep being fully free but stop being FSDG compliant. There such distribution would then need the kind of control you're mentioning from the start, otherwise they could end up in a situation where they need to fix things and acquiring that capability requires too much time investment to be practical. In all these 3 cases the situation doesn't change if the distribution needs to have the control you're talking about or if they need to have a commitment to fix mistakes. With Uruk that seems to differ because the commitment to fix FSDG bugs is covered somehow (because bugs can be fixed either by having users bugreport to Puri.sm or having Uruk itself bugreport to Puri.sm) but they can't directly change Puri.sm packages for instance to fix security issues. But to me it seems that the FSDG doesn't seems to imply that the distribution needs to modify packages for other reasons than FSDG compliance, so I don't see that as being an issue, but maybe I've missed some uses cases. So as far as I understand all that is more or less already covered by the FSDG, thought it could also be clarified in some way. What looks more problematic is more to handle the case where an old version of a distribution stops being maintained and disappears and that another distribution (like Replicant or Uruk) depends on very specific distributions and versions. For instance PureOS green seems to have disappeared (I badly want an archive of the repository if someone has it, it's to fix an important bug in Replicant). But here again, I don't see why the community around FSDG distributions at large could not take care of that issue somehow. What is most important here seems to be that the issue is taken care of, not who does it. For instance archiving mirrors could be done by anyone, and the maintenance could be shared if needed. There could also be some FSDG-only maintenance of older versions if needed. Denis.
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