"Staying close to upstream"

[Matt McCutchen]

On Thu, 2010-08-12 at 22:26 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> Do you have any sort of proof that it's a "political" reason?  It would
> seem to me that our kernel maintainers do not wish to include code that
> hasn't been blessed by Linus in our packages.  Doing so has burned us in
> the past, and perhaps this code has real issues that are keeping it out
> of upstream.  We should not presume to be smarter than upstream,
> particularly when the kernel is involved.  The package maintainer
> ultimately has control over what does or does not go into their package,
> and in this case they seem to be favoring sticking close to upstream as
> opposed to throwing in code willy nilly because it looks cool.  Upstream
> has a code review process for a reason.

IMO, staying close to upstream is simply a means to the end of shipping
better software, and Fedora should be prepared to deviate from upstream
when the benefit is compelling compared to the additional maintenance
cost (though it's hard to say whether this standard is met in any given
case).  That's why I'm so frustrated that Fedora seems to be committed
to keeping the Mozilla trademarks, which moot any discussion of whether
to deviate for those packages.  But this is only my opinion.  Fedora is
welcome to set its own course, and I am welcome to fork (in theory at
least).

-- 
Matt