Subject: Re: Bug#531221: okular: Arbitrarily enforces DRM

From: Ana Guerrero <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 19:51:15 +0200

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 07:09:11PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> Package: okular
> Version: 4:4.2.2-2
...

Hi John,

I hope at least you read this email and get the whole map. Why this bug 
report is tagged as wontfix and why your patch won't be applied.

You have got answers from several people from the KDE team and you seemed to 
stick only to the aggressive ones (i guess because they annoyed you).
okular belongs to the official KDE modules, in Debian those modules
are maintained for a variable group of people. No everybody is the same active,
and we usually have time with more and less activity. This is good because 
in theory there is always somebody around, the truth is the team is always
lacking of people.

We all have very different points of view, and we almost never agree on 
something, and always have to search for some compromise. This time we all 
agreed on something after a lot of time, this was nice, thanks for this :D

About this option in okular, call it protection bit, DRM or whatever you want,
there are  2 options: enabled or disabled. I think this is clear for everybody.
And you have to choose one. Personally, I think there are good reasons for 
having it enabled and for having it disabled, like it happens with any setting
in KDE (in some cases it is more complicated because you do not choose between
2 options, more like 10). This is usually just a technical decision, and in KDE 
you always can change this options, but here it got mixed with something 
social, people's feeling towards DRM or copy restrictions.
They exist and they are there, when we disagree against such laws, we should
try to not get them in our respective countries (if you are lucky enough to 
live in a democratic country).
We tend to respect upstream's defaults, this is important for consistency across 
distros, and we patch only what is needed for fixing big bugs or integration
with the Debian system (in the sense of using proper paths for stuff, libraries
that are somehow different in debian, changes for archs we support, ...).
I think we are one of the distros that is patching less.

I am sorry, but I am not going to change a default because you think something
should be differently. I also think that having konsole by default with limited
scroll is a bad idea and i do not patch away. I do not feel empowered to decide
what is better or worse for the users, so I will keep upstream defaults except
when there is a good reason for change them, and there is not good reason here.

I think this copy restrictions stuff could be improved in okular itself, because 
software _always_ can be improved, but I do not know how. So if you have a good 
idea, report it upstream. If the idea is good, okular authors will be glad to 
improve their software. Debian will carry with that.

Finally, today I have seen you quoting in IRC the usual "Our priorities are our 
users and free software". John, if you are really worried about our users, you 
should wonder why Debian skip the release 4.2.3 of KDE or if your KDE team needs 
helps with upcoming 4.3. That will serve all of the users.

Ana