[arch-general] cdrtools again... yay! - Was: Burning From Command Line

[Allan McRae]

On 27/05/10 00:04, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Allan McRae<allan at archlinux.org>  wrote:
>
>> [about time we changed the subject]
>>
>> Joerg,
>>
>> Even given you are correct about licensing terms (which I do not care to
>> dispute), currently all risk lies on the distributor.  Given many
>> distributions have (perhaps wrongly) chosen not to package cdrtools,
>> there is obviously some implied risk.  This is to your disadvantage. No
>> amount of emails from you is going to nullify that risk.
>
> If you would act at least be halfway consistent to what you claim, Arch needs
> to immediately drop the fork as there is a hint that there is a definite
> Copyright violation in the fork.
>
> I am happy to discuss things _after_ you prove a consistent behavior......

A lot of people make claims against cdrtools.  I do not care that they 
all stem from "slander" at Debian, those claims have spread.   One 
person makes claims about cdrkit.    We will consistently ignore the 
claims of single people, dismissing them as crackpots.

And the license of cdrtools is not even the reason that cdrtools is not 
packaged in Arch.  On the edge license cases like this have never really 
been considered by Arch developers as an issue. They are all free 
licenses in spirit.  Only clear cases of licenses prohibiting 
distribution have prevented us from packaging something we wanted to in 
the past (e.g. acrobat, opera).  As far as I know, there is no official 
decision stating cdrtools can not be packaged for Arch, just no-one has 
the motivation to do so.


So lets be blunt here, because doing otherwise is getting us nowhere.

I do not speak for the other Arch developers, but the reason why I will 
not officially package cdrtools for Arch is you.  My impression of you 
is that you are very, very annoying and irritating.  If there was a bug 
report made about the cdrtools package in Arch, then I would have to 
deal with you.  I do not particularly want to do that, so I will not 
package cdrtools.  I have heard similar opinions expressed by developers 
from various other distributions while at Linux meetings, so I am not 
alone here, even though I might be the only one blunt enough to say it 
directly.

Allan