On 24/02/18 13:09, Paul Hammant wrote:
GitHub heralded one fantastic thing that didn't exist before - easy forking
or a repo. That is more likely to force an 'upstream' dev team to be more
benevolent to directions of others. Perhaps because of the possibility of
mind-share shifting to the fork and away from the upstream/origin. That
divergence from the origin happens isn't a problem necessarily. I've been
doing open source for 18 years now, and the only thorny thing that remains
is trademarks (were the forker wanting to release a binary) and a lesser
honor system: "hey stop using the name of my OSS tool/lib because you're
just confusing people". Node.js and Io.js is a notable case
<https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/09/node_js_v400_reunites_with_io_js/>
.
If you have your patches, then just apply them to a fork on GitHub. You
don't have to become maintainer - make that clear in the readme
<https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/xerces/c/trunk/README> (oooh maybe
http://makeareadme.com/ applies). Start something there and see if there
are others that want to help. One of them might become maintainer :)
It's not quite that simple when you're dealing with versioned shared
libraries, and you yourself are making versioned shared libraries for
others to use. We need to be compatible with the wider ecosystem using
these libraries.
If I fork it, I'll have to change the library name, and that will make
me incompatible with the rest of the world--all downstream consumers
including my own. And the fixes won't propagate through all the various
OS distributions without a very large effort. I could fork it, but it's
an option of last resort since it's easy to do, but a logistical
nightmare to deal with the fallout. I don't want to maintain a whole
forked project, I want to submit a handful of essential bugfixes and
make a new point release which benefits everyone.
I've already applied a number of these patches to various Linux
distributions, FreeBSD ports, Mac homebrew formula etc. We need a new
upstream release containing these fixes, not a hard fork.
Thanks,
Roger
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