On 09/03/2011 07:31 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
To look at things at a higher level: it's clearly the goal of
the
guidelines that any interested party (with sufficient basic knowledge)
who comes along and checks a Fedora package out of git should be able to
_understand it_, and this includes finding out where all the stuff that
goes to make up the package actually comes from. glibc spec clearly
doesn't achieve this goal; the casual browser is left looking at a
gigantic patch and a mystery tarball and wondering where they came from
and what they do, as I was. This makes glibc not at all raptor-proof,
and not very amenable to outside review or improvements, which is rather
against the spirit of an open source, community project.
And the mind goes to a recent case of "obfuscation by merging patches".
http://lwn.net/Articles/432012/
In that case RedHat acknowledged that a single giant patch is more
difficult to understand and it confirmed that this was considered a
feature (for commercial reasons); someone even started to debate
if that could be considered a GPL violation, on the "source in preferred
form" criteria.
Regards.
--
Roberto Ragusa mail at robertoragusa.it