Including a patched version of an upstream library -- advice?

[Mary Ellen Foster]

So I decided to try upping my own review karma by trying to review
some outstanding Java packages. Unfortunately, I seem to have chosen
one with an "interesting" issue:
    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=464013

The package in question is "findbugs-bcel": an alternative version of
the bcel library (already in Fedora), including a fairly large patch
from the developers of the "findbugs" package. There seems to be no
hope of getting this patch into upstream bcel (e.g.,
https://mailman.cs.umd.edu/pipermail/findbugs-discuss/2007-April/001880.html).
There was a short discussion on this on fedora-devel-list last year:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2007-September/msg00865.html

What's the official policy here?

I guess I should try to find a more straightforward package for my
first review ...

MEF

-- 
Mary Ellen Foster  --  http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mef/
Informatik 6: Robotics and Embedded Systems, Technische Universität München
and ICCS, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

[Tom Callaway]

On Fri, 2008-12-12 at 11:16 +0100, Mary Ellen Foster wrote:
>  So I decided to try upping my own review karma by trying to review
>  some outstanding Java packages. Unfortunately, I seem to have chosen
>  one with an "interesting" issue:
>      https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=464013
>  
>  The package in question is "findbugs-bcel": an alternative version of
>  the bcel library (already in Fedora), including a fairly large patch
>  from the developers of the "findbugs" package. There seems to be no
>  hope of getting this patch into upstream bcel (e.g.,
>  https://mailman.cs.umd.edu/pipermail/findbugs-discuss/2007-April/001880.html).
>  There was a short discussion on this on fedora-devel-list last year:
>  http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2007-September/msg00865.html
>  
>  What's the official policy here? 
Hmmm. This is definitely open source fail.

So, here is my opinion:

If the bcel maintainer is okay with this, and the findbugs-bcel package
does not conflict in any way whatsoever... alright. I'm not happy about
it, but I don't want to be a pain in a situation that isn't going to be
resolved properly anytime soon.

~spot