[IAEP] Packaging eToys (was Sugar on Edubuntu)

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Fri, 7 Nov 2008, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 10:54:38PM +1100, Costello, Rob R wrote:
>> From outside this all looks as though it might suffer from being a
>> little too pedantic in adhering to definitional terms
>
>> It feels as free and open as can be, in terms of what you can see and 
>> change and modify
>
> Please note that the reason for eToys being kept out of debian "main" is 
> *not* that it is considered non-free.
>
> Debian maintains more than 20.000 packages, and eToys as so far been 
> judged too "odd" for Debian to maintain, eg. for patching in case of 
> security issues.
>
> Yes, I know that upstream developers of eToys, as most upstream
> developers of large projects, will find it unnecessary for Debian to
> take such responsibility in the first place. That Debian can simply rely
> on upstream to handle bug-fixing including security issues.
>
> But Debian wants the ability to handle it on their own. With the help
> from upstream as needd, but fundamentally have the ability to e.g
> consider something worthy of fixing that upstream perhaps do not find
> relevant to fix.

This is going to be a bit of an issue with Fedora as well, to be honest. 
The structure of eToys is very alien to what packagers are accustomed to 
dealing with.  Copying Gavin Romig-Koch... Gavin, now that the licensing 
issues have been worked out, have you started working on the Fedora 
packages?  I wonder if there are any lessons that can be shared between 
Debian and Fedora maintainers in this case.

--g