From: Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr>
Date: 24 May 2002 23:49:29 +0200
Why ? You can make all edits you like, they just won't be folded back to
their tree. You can retrieve all their fixes, just if you have an
important change to do in their core, do it as free speech on their
public mailing list, do not provide a patch.
I can't edit their code because effectively I could contaminate
their sources.
Say I make some global networking API change, and this required
a significant edit to ipsec to make it comply with the new
structure layout or whatever.
And let's assume there is only one clear way to implement the
change, no other way to do the change would make any sense at all.
So the IPSEC people would have to effectively avoid integrating my
change, ie. it is a big onus on them to make their version of the API
update different enough from my edits so that nobody can claim they
just applied my change.
And the fact that there would be two edits makes no sense. If a
change has to occur twice in two different ways this makes merging a
disaster.
So someone quips "just let them edit and just merge from IPSEC" and
I say I refuse to let something just sit in the tree that I cannot
edit when I want to make sweeping changes across the tree. That is
unacceptable.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri May 31 2002 - 22:00:14 EST