On Thu, 21 Aug 2014, dev wrote:
Just a question. Should I read between the lines here and guess that the curl in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is somehow a fork from the actual golden code that I get at http://curl.haxx.se/download/ ?
No, it isn't a fork but yes the Redhat version is rarely identical to the untouched upstream version.
That change was a bug reported to Redhat that Kamil worked on, made a patch for and then merged that into our git tree. We get a number of bug reports through such means, Redhat's bug tracker a good such source but not the only one. Kamil tends to pick them up for us.
Yes, as you can see in that report Redhat patched their released version and re-packaged it for their users while we "only" merged it into our dev tree and relased the fix in our _next_ release. That's a very common practise among Linux distros, and yes it makes the distros' versions deviate from the upstream original source tarball (more and more over time as they patch bugs). They are also known to sometimes backport fixes into older releases so thus a distro's version B may in fact be improved compared to our "real" version B.
In general this is a good thing: it makes the fix get tested for real sooner and it helps their users avoid known problems sooner.
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