On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 9:58 AM, Bertrand Delacretaz <bdelacre...@apache.org> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 3:54 PM, Shawn Heisey <apa...@elyograg.org> wrote: >> ...Their changes do mean that when people come to the solr-user mailing >> list looking for help, we sometimes have to refer them to the downstream >> maintainers, because we can't make any sense of where things are.... > > To me this is clearly a case that requires those maintainers to change the > name. > > Based on your description their code is clearly a fork of Apache Solr, > and we shouldn't allow people to keep our names for such external > forks. > > -Bertrand
Are you sure? I would think it's quite common for file locations to change by a downstream packager, to support the downstream packaging requirements/conventions. Accumulo has this issue sometimes with Cloudera and/or Hadoop packaging of Accumulo. We get questions about errors which don't exist anywhere in Accumulo's source code, or about classpath problems which apply to the users environment, but not the vanilla upstream packages we provide from the official source release. At what point are we growing our community and promoting our respective projects/brands by encouraging sharing and integration, and at what point does a downstream packager's action cause us to consider it a "fork" with the requirement to change the name? If we took a hard line on this, things would get really crazy... almost no package in a downstream distro, like Fedora or Ubuntu, would match its upstream origins (because they are all forked to some extent to make it work in that environment). And, that would be detrimental. On the other hand, if we're too soft on this, then substantial forks begin to reflect badly on the upstream project. In the case of Solr, it might be the case that it's a substantial external fork, in need of rebranding. But, if it's just file locations being moved around to match a distro filesystem layout requirements, or to do typical distro dependency convergence, backport patches, and the like, that seems pretty much norm, and it might be a bit too aggressive to require them to rebrand.
