[haiku-development] Re: Finally deciding on a new source control system for Haiku
- From: Urias McCullough <umccullough@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 3 May 2011 11:05:46 -0700
On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Adrien Destugues
<pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I really wish you wouldn't speak for all of us. At least I don't see any
>> "going out of control" risks. If we switch to git, I'd consider it
>> inevitable that people would clone the official repository on GitHub,
>> Gitorious, etc. and I don't see a problem with that. On the contrary, I'd
>> even encourage a more open development.
>
> This is not a problem per se, the question is, can we track all these forks
> and merge the changes which deserve it ? Or will one of the forks become
> more widely used because we can't keep up with the stream of patches from
> them ? On one side it's nice to see more development hapenning, on the other
> it's of no use if each patch lives in a separate fork and there is no easy
> way to merge them all.
But forks aren't really a bad thing... that's more or less what
happened with Android/Linux, and I certainly don't see it as a bad
thing. Sure, there are some Linux people who are annoyed that they
can't easily merge Android changes back to Linux, but I think it just
sounds cranky. They chose a license which allowed it, and then they
created artificial barriers to accepting contributions back, so what
would they expect?
Haiku, in some ways, does the same - setting a somewhat high bar for
contributions - so we should anticipate (and welcome) forks. This is a
good thing! If someone produces a very good fork, and the project
recognizes their work as valuable, they should be welcome to merge
their changes back to the master repo directly. If they choose not to
(for whatever personal reasons), then it becomes the onus of Haiku's
developers to do it if they wish to use the code. How is that really
any different than the current situation? I think the difference is
that we'll see a lot more people participating on the fringes than we
do now, and more people working with Haiku code, modifying it,
deriving from it, and improving it cannot be a bad thing.
As long as we use a strong-enough trademark policy, we shouldn't fear
someone trying to create their own "Haiku" branded operating system...
- Urias
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