From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Sun May 12 2002 - 16:02:56 EDT
At 08:07 PM 5/12/02 +0100, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>I have added Pango soureces into the tree (under src/other/pango).
>This is to allow us to work on any needed patches before we
>submit them to the Pango mainteners. The files are based on the
>1.0.1 release, with couple of changes by me.
A note on tree organization for "other people's code". I'm pretty sure
Tomas knows this already, but it may help others in the future.
In general, we originally used src/other for code when we expected that we'd
need to maintain a fork indefinitely. The classic example of this is all
our ispell hackage. Another use case would be when we want to only build
and use a small portion of a much larger library.
By contrast, for actively maintained libraries where we expected any changes
to be (eventually) accepted upstream, we put them in CVS as peer libraries.
The goal is for the peer module to eventually converge with known good
versions of the "official" library, but some short-term divergence is
acceptable while we get patches moved back upstream.
rationale
---------
The whole point of having peer modules under our CVS control is so that we
can always build from known-good versions which work on all our platforms.
In some cases, our CVS version of a peer module may lag the "official"
version. In other cases, our CVS version may lead the "official" sources --
especially if we need to improve its portability.
Thus, while we want to converge over the long run, small known variations in
*either* direction are acceptable in the short term.
bottom line
-----------
By allowing this variance in peer modules, we can explicitly signal to
maintainers that any forkage is intended to be temporary. We're willing to
help if needed, but we want *them* to maintain their code -- that's why we
picked it!
Plus which, this strategy prevents us from having to reorg our trees once
our changes *are* accepted upstream.
Paul,
who likes standing on shoulders
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