Hi Florent,
On Dec 29, 2012, at 9:46 AM, Florent <[email protected]> wrote:
> I did a Big Merge and pushed it on GitHub: it is based on the lp:divmod.org
> branch and includes all the contributions from the various branches I have
> identified.
I'm not one of the maintainers you're asking about, but it seems to me like the
problem of "too many forks" is rarely addressed well by another fork.
Many of the changes to pyflakes in the forks you've mentioned were never
contributed upstream in any way; some of the changes that were contributed
upstream have introduced regressions that no one has yet fixed. Different
people have different priorities for their fixes, but PyFlakes is used as (for
example) the commit hook on many projects, so introducing new types of spurious
errors that need new workarounds is really bad, and of course introducing
untested changes that may cause other errors to be missed in some cases is also
bad.
Also, although the license technically allows this type of redistribution, none
of these authors have recorded their authorship in the license nor have they
given you permission, even implicitly, to distribute their work separately
without acknowledgement. Maybe they all meant to license it under some
horrible new license but hadn't gotten around to it yet. Since git encourages
you to throw away history, I assume your fork (like all the other forks) has
thrown away the record of who did what, and so it will be an impossible mess to
sort out whose copyright is whose if a problem arises later. The somewhat odd
shape of the lp:divmod.org repository was a part of a painstaking attempt to
preserve all history so that problems like this would _not_ arise.
Although it is up to the maintainers that you've already mentioned, I think
that the best way to start here is to ask the authors of the respective changes
you want to merge to simply submit their patches upstream. If they can't even
be convinced to do that much then it seems like an effort at collaboration is
unlikely to succeed.
-glyph
--
Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~divmod-dev
Post to : [email protected]
Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~divmod-dev
More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
