Miloslav Trmač (mitr@xxxxxxxx) said: > On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 4:18 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 08:14:13AM -0500, Stephen Gallagher wrote: > >> Personally, my stance on this is that, provided that the forks are > >> properly renamed such that they will not conflict with other forks of > >> the same codebase, there's no reason to disallow them. As mentioned by > >> Toshio in the ticket, carrying forks provides a much better alternative > >> to bundled libraries in the situations where the primary codebase is > >> lacking certain features. > > > > There's exactly the same reason to avoid closely-related forks as there > > is to avoid embedded libraries - if you have a security issue you now > > have more places to fix the same bug. The question is whether that cost > > is larger or smaller than the gain from carrying the forked code. > > There is one crucial difference: A maintainer of a forked code base > explicitly knows he is maintaining it; a maintainer of a software > package that happens to embed a library may not think about > maintaining the embedded library at all. Right - we should make it clear to people packaging things like cinnamon/muffin that it may not be the most healthy long-term alternative, and may cause them pain in the long run. (Hey, name-based metaphors!) But as long as they're aware of that pain, I don't see why we should deny them the opportunity, or force them to try and port software away from the fork. Bill -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
