Clarify our position on forks (was: Re: Plan for tomorrow's FESCo meeting (2012-02-27 at 18UTC))

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Kevin Fenzi wrote on 27.02.2012 04:21:
> 
> #topic #810 Clarify our position on forks .fesco 810

It's just a statement that is asked for in the ticket, but nevertheless:
Shouldn't issues like this be discussed on this list first, so FESCo
members can get a impression from the flamewar ^w discussion what the
developer community thinks about the issue raised?

CU
 knurd

P.S.: For those that are to lazy to click two times (I assume a lot
people are to lazy; I'm often to lazy myself...) to open the ticket in
question, here is its text:

> phenomenon
> 
> We have a policy to  forbid bundled libraries, but it's unclear what
> this means for forks. background analysis
> 
> With mate and cinnamon, forks seem to become more and more popular.
> Some of these forks are about to enter Fedora and therefor we need to
> clarify our position on forks and the duplication of system
> libraries.
> 
> Both muffin (fork of mutter) and cinnamon (fork of gnome-shell) are
> forks for nearly a reason. The code changes are minimal, the biggest
> change is the change of the headers to include the new FSFE address -
> and it seems not even this trivial change was forwarded to the GNOME
> developers.
> 
> There are more problems:
> 
> We are already working around problems in packaging that were fixed
> in the orignal code upstream Given the rate of commits the forks will
> have a hard time catching up with the originals. They already lag
> behind massively.
> 
> More background info in Bugzilla
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=771252 in particular
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=771252#c21