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