On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 07:34:57PM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >>"Anthony" == Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> Anthony> Are you going to go through the distribution and maintain a
> Anthony> list of which packages all these tags apply to, and which
> Anthony> they don't?
> Heh. Sure. I'll do it once. And your proposal has no way of
> ensuring the tags are either accurate, or are maintained.
You'll do it once, or you'll actually maintain them?
I don't see the point of keeping around non-* tags if no one is going to
make any effort towards keeping them up to date.
> You shall be provided with the non- tags for the countries I
> mentioned. And I think you are assuming facts not in evidence. I
> think the chinese and japanese debian populations have been very
> active, and have done wonders in internationalization efforts; your
> estimate that only US and european (and presumably au and nz) tags
> are gonna get done is an insult.
Well then, there's no issue, is there? If the .jp and .cn people are
interested and motivated enough to keep a list of which packages are or
aren't allowed in their respective jurisdictions, more power to them.
> Anthony> ``You can't have non-DE tags because no one would be able to manage
> Anthony> non-IN!''
> Anthony> And sure, if someone *is* able to reasonably keep track of
> Anthony> which packages are legal in India, well, then there's no
> Anthony> issue with having a non-IN tag.
> Oh, so not there is going to be a a requireent that there
> shall be a team of people conversant with intellectual property law
> behind every such tag who shall keep abreast of changes in the laws?
> Espescally that the internet is driving some rather drastic changes
> in that field?
How do you propose someone is going to keep track of which packages
are legal in India without being conversant with Indian intellectual
property law?
> Anthony> Personally, I suspect no one's going to be bothered to
> Anthony> maintain the tags for Germany or the UK, let alone anywhere
> Anthony> else, so I suspect this is a non issue. At this point I'm
> Anthony> fairly convinced that there aren't any realistic legal or
> Anthony> technical issues against it though.
> I see. scalability, feasibility, correctness, and
> maintainability are not technical issues we need deal with.
What all of those complaints effectively amount to is finding people
with the time, skill and motiviation to maintain said tags, which are
manpower issues, not technical ones.
Yes, if a country's laws are significantly different to US laws it'll
require a lot of effort on behalf of said people (maintainability and
feasibility), and yes, if you can't find people competent in whichever
country's laws, that country's tags might be worthless (correctness),
but those are only reasons not to go out of our way to rush in and do it,
not to object and insist that it must never ever be done.
Actually I don't think I can see any scalability issues at all: increasing
the number of countries we have non-* tags for (once we have more than
just non-US) is just a matter of having more people to cope with them,
and the number of packages we have is apparently growing linearly,
so if they can manage now, they can probably manage in the future too.
Frequently update packages probably isn't that much of an issue either,
since packages probably don't change their legality that often.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``_Any_ increase in interface difficulty, in exchange for a benefit you
do not understand, cannot perceive, or don't care about, is too much.''
-- John S. Novak, III (The Humblest Man on the Net)
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