This is generally not allowed in Fedora. If you want an exception for something like this, it would go to FESCo, not here. And FESCo would not consider the request ordinarily unless the Fedora Kernel Team (ie. @jforbes) was okay with it.

That said, you can have alternative kernels in COPR (and many do).

I don't intend to have this this kernel published outside of COPR. But I want to keep it as close to the standard Fedora kernel as possible, the most straight forward way that I can think to do that is to fork (https://src.fedoraproject.org/fork/bbellamy/rpms/kernel) from kernel. In fact, I have the rk5388 patchset building with fedpkg local and I want to publish that without resorting to binary blobs.

It seems like to flow for normal fedora packages and the flow for COPR are kept separate and I'm not sure what to do to keep things simple and above board.

What Neal wrote already is the truth and reopening the bug isn't going to change anything.

Luckily it's all open source and you can already fork that repository and host your own RPMs (or do it in COPR), so there's no need for Fedora to do anything here.

Also please work with the upstream kernel and get your drivers upstream. Then they'll get into Fedora automatically.

I fully agree with the policy cited with respect to the One Kernel Policy and I'm not seeking an exception. This is for COPR only. I feel like my messages are not being read and/or understood. What am I missing?

These patches are already being up-streamed as they become ready. Some are not yet ready for an official merge, but are ready enough to allow functionality of pieces of hardware that are otherwise non-functional. I just need a safe space to post patches that is open and I thought my workspace here: https://src.fedoraproject.org/fork/bbellamy/rpms/kernel would suffice. However, I cannot push here unless I'm sponsored, from what I understand. I plan to point COPR to that location to build a clean binary for distribution. What is the proper way to do it?

To suggest that I should host my own binary RPMs is disapointing and is a nogo for me as I consider that bad security practice these days.

You can push in your fork if you use HTTPS commit: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/HTTPS-commits