Accessibility of pre-release materials

[Ben Cooksley]

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 12:21 AM, Michael Palimaka
<kensington at gentoo.org> wrote:
> On 17/08/15 19:19, Ben Cooksley wrote:
>> Hi Packagers,
>>
>> It has been brought to my attention that at least Gentoo is making
>> packages (in this case ebuilds) available to general users for
>> packages which KDE has not yet released.
>>
>> Please ensure that packages are not made (easily) available to general
>> users when preparing your packages. (Using private / not publicly
>> documented repositories for this purpose is considered fine).
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ben Cooksley
>> KDE Sysadmin
>
> Hi Ben,

Hi Michael,

>
> As a source-based distribution, Gentoo does not distribute packages in
> the traditional sense. The packages (ebuilds) we distribute are just
> text files describing how to build the source. At no point do we
> distribute anything produced by KDE that is not publicly released.

Oki. Good to know...

>
> It is true that we have ebuilds for unreleased software (along with
> other experimental work) in a public repository, but this has not been a
> problem in the past because:
>
>         1. As previously mentioned, these are text files only
>
>         2. They are not stored in the default repository - this special
> repository must be manually enabled by the user
>
>         3. These ebuilds are "masked" so they are not visible to the package
> manager by default. The user must take explicit action to attempt to use
> them
>
>         4. Even if a user ignores the above and attempts to use the ebuild
> anyway, it will fail. Our mirroring system is mostly automatic, fetching
> from public KDE mirrors - so it's not possible for a file to appear on
> our mirrors until it appears on yours

Excellent. That should be sufficient, so I wonder what happened then.

>
> I would appreciate any further information about what exactly has
> occurred so that I may investigate.

Please see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351360 - i'm guessing
this user jumped through the above hoops somehow?

>
> Please also accept my apologies if any inconvenience has been caused.

Not a problem :)

>
> Best regards,
> Michael

Cheers,
Ben