Subject: minimizing forks (was Re: commit -- removed unused directory in expat)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Mon Feb 05 2001 - 12:47:20 CST
At 11:23 PM 2/2/01 -0600, Sam TH wrote:
>Ok, the situation with expat is kind of strange. (I've spend a good
>bit of time over the last 24 hours hacking expat.) Their CVS tree
>includes about 4 different directories with sample program. It should
>be noted that none of them actually built properly (although that was
>easy to fix). Only one of those programs (xmlwf) was distributed with
>1.95.1, the version currently in our tree.
Sam,
I'm not familiar with more recent expat source drops, so I'll defer to your
knowledge there.
My point was pretty simple. We use a ton of other people's code in AbiWord.
There are three ways to do so:
A. use unmodified sources
--------------------------
Ideally, we'd be able to feed enough changes back upstream, so that we could
build what we need from totally unmodified copies of the maintainer's
library.
B. minimal additive forks
--------------------------
We've fallen into the practice of maintaining a very minor fork of these
libraries, mainly to add a Makefile.abi for the convenience of our XP build
system. It looks like Hub's in the process of adding Makefile.mpws for a
similar reason.
As forks go, this is pretty benign, because everything from the original
maintainer is still there and ready to use. We've just augmented it a bit.
C. more invasive forks
-----------------------
Yes, there are sections of the "official" expat sourcedrop that we don't
need or use. (The same is true of wv.) However, it seems like a more
invasive fork to delete them from the drops we publish. In short, we'd be
distributing expat-- instead of expat.
Maybe it's just me, but this feels a lot ruder.
bottom line
-----------
I have a slight preference for A over B, but making that move sounds like
a ton of work. I have a much stronger preference for B over C, in part
because it seems like so much less work.
>I have to say that I find
>it extremely unlikely that anyone would come looking to our version of
>expat so that they could build a tiny application, distributed to
>demonstrate how to use expat, which canonicalizes XML.
This feels like a red herring. The minimum expectation anyone should have
when they download a copy of the expat sources is that it has all of expat
in it.
If they get a copy from us which has more, that's better.
If they get a copy from us which has less, that's worse.
>However, if
>you continue to object, I'll probably put it back in. I won't put in
>the other stuff in expat cvs that's not in our tree, though.
Hmm. I'm not sure what to advise you on here. I've been assuming that the
only work needed to upgrade our copy of expat (or any other mirrored
library we require) to a newer upstream version was roughly as follows:
1. identify what our diffs to the last baseline were
2. cvs import all of the new version
3. apply the patch from #1
4. update Makefile.abi to build any new files
5. ignore any unused "official" sources in our distro (but keep them)
Our only difference of opinion here is how to handle #5, right?
Paul,
who doesn't mean to be cranky
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Feb 05 2001 - 12:39:43 CST