Jennifer Pioch wrote:
> On 7/26/09, Garrett D'Amore <gdamore at sun.com> wrote:
>
>
> Didn't you read what Roland wrote about the project rules?
>
>> in several major and unbreakable rules for this project which
>> includes:
>> - WE DO NOT FORK THE CODE
>> - WE DO NOT BREAK THE KSH93 TEST SUITE
>> - THE KSH93 TEST SUITE IS COMPLETELY OFF-LIMITS FOR CHANGES
>>
>
> If you are forking the code with such unnecessary changes I will NO
> LONGER CONTRIBUTE to this or any other Opensolaris.org project.
>
Roland and I had a long conversation about this. Generally such a
hardline does not work with projects that are part ON. I can think of
no other project that is part of ON and has a hard and fast rule such as
this. If such a rule was desired, then the project should probably
have remained outside of ON (perhaps as SFW).
All of which is to say that forking the code from the upstream is not to
be taken lightly. But neither is it an absolute requirement that code
stay 100% true to the upstream.
The upstream projects will often have different goals from the
OpenSolaris project, and reasonable people can disagree. When an
impasse is reached, each project must do what it deems is best for itself.
Furthermore, there can be cases where a support engineer may make
changes to the code base in order to fix an urgent bug -- such a change
is not necessarily guaranteed to receive Roland's (or any other
particular individual's) approval, nor is it guaranteed to be
synchronized with the upstream.
These are just the rules of engagement for ON.
I really hope that nobody leaves the project over an issue like this,
but it is important to understand the ROE -- it would be very
unfortunate if (whether as part of this case or as part of any other
case) such a change took place and people upset to the point of quitting
the project over it.
- Garrett
