Comments on: When is a fork not a fork?

By: Luis Matos

Luis Matos — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 14:41:11 +0000

Just pointing here my aproval to dcc alliance. As company member, i like the idea of having a core that is common to several distributions and that is supported by some hardware and software vendors.
Regarding all debian criticism, i think that dcc can be a fork, by using the base and changing it, but not considering a fork because of dcc alliance’s objectives that are updating debian stable releases to business base.
For example, a fork is ubuntu, because it is 100% new and non debian compliant, the opposite of dcc. I am testing PR2 right now, only there are few mirrors … as someone said before, keep up the good work, and hopefully, with my help. Best regards

By: michael

michael — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 18:37:06 +0000

I think you’ve made a mistake trying to modify the meaning of fork to the only people that have any interest in the topic. The “branch that merges back into the tree” is most appropriate here.

The DCC is absolutely the right thing to do, and some people won’t like the changes as a result and there’s nothing to be done about that.

Balancing the commercial interests and the totally free Debian interests will always be a gigantic challenge. Please exercise extraordinary care, because mistakes like your “fork” comments now harm both projects.

Good luck.

By: ElHobbit

ElHobbit — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 09:34:44 +0000

¿Why don’t use the gnome 2.10.2 from Debian testing? Works fine on my Sarge and bring some new and amacing programs like evince.
With gnome 2.12 in all the others distributions, the use of 2.10.2 at least dont look so old like the use of 2.8
I think than Progeny will be the “Debian for Workstation”

PD: Excuse my poor english… Im from Spain

By: ajax

ajax — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 01:22:20 +0000

Xorg 6.7 was >90% identical to XFree86 4.4. not a fork?

you seem to be hinging this whole notion of fork-or-not on the existance of irreconcilable differences between the developers of the branches. if it were my debian kernel, i wouldn’t accept the win4lin patch; it might be free software in the narrow sense, but it exists solely to make closed software possible.

sounds like fork material to me.

the delta between the DDCA code and stock Debian will continue to be non-zero, as the patches that the DCCA decides are necessary take time to make their way back into Debian. surprise, it’s a fork. claiming that some percentage of packages or some number of lines of code constitutes a Real Fork and that DCCA is therefore not a Real Fork is disingenuous. these are not the droids we’re looking for, apparently.

there’s no shame in forking. just don’t lie.

By: Matthew O'Bleatishea

Matthew O'Bleatishea — Wed, 21 Sep 2005 19:15:11 +0000

> Does that constitute a fork?

How does that *not* constitute a fork?

By: Pete

Pete — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:56:26 +0000

Ian, thanks for putting up with all the bullshit and smears you have to put up with from certain parts of today’s Debian crowd when trying to pull off anything useful or interesting. Keep up the good work.

By: Jon Åslund

Jon Åslund — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 20:20:23 +0000

DCC will start as a fork, but since it does not want to diverge it will live on for a while as a “branch to be merged” and hopefully, after all differences are solved, end up as a subset.

By: Christoph Hellwig

Christoph Hellwig — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 18:42:21 +0000

The win4lin patch is just adding hooks for a propritary module. I’m very disappointed that you’re adding such a patch violating my and many others
copyrights. I’ll reserve myself future legal actions.