RedHat forks OpenSSH?

Jos Vos jos at xos.nl
Mon Nov 8 23:50:57 UTC 2004


On Tue, Nov 09, 2004 at 07:23:44AM +1100, Damien Miller wrote:

> Nobody disputes Redhat's right to fork OpenSSH, but why does
> Redhat not make their desired changes through the standard RPM
> patching mechanism? By distributing their own OpenSSH tarballs
> instead of patching pristine sources, Redhat breaks the link of
> transparency, accountability and trust that their own RPM build
> model is supposed to provide.

They do the same for "xmms", for example, to eliminate MP3 support
*and also not ship MP3 source code*, due to possible legal issues.

Although I do not know this case, I guess a similar reason applies
here: they explicitly do not want to ship certain source code
included in the original tarball and just applying a patch in the
spec file does not help for that, you need to modify the tarball.

-- 
--    Jos Vos <jos at xos.nl>
--    X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV   |   Phone: +31 20 6938364
--    Amsterdam, The Netherlands        |     Fax: +31 20 6948204




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