>> But of course one can expect better behaviour from Andrea.
> I am getting bored by these complains.
Ak - there were invisible smileys there, but you overlooked them.
But now let me look more precisely at your statements - not in
the extremely insignificant tunelp setting, but as a general issue.
One of the basic property of GPL licence is to allow everybody to fork a
GPL'd tree. So forking a GPL tree is _not_ a bad thing.
Your logic fails. Not everything that is not forbidden is also good.
If ten people discover and fix a flaw in mount and send their patches
to the maintainer then the next distribution will have a better mount.
If each forks an own version of mount, as is allowed by GPL, then that will
produce ten versions of mount, each with nine known flaws; different
distributions will pick different versions as their standard, and soon
we have a mess with lots of incompatibilities.
Forking is very expensive in resources.
... Since it was faster for me to take over
instead of searching and then contacting the author
Hmm. Reading your source (lines 2-3 of tunelp.c):
* Copyright (C) 1992-1997 Michael K. Johnson, johnsonm@redhat.com *
* Copyright (C) 1998 Andrea Arcangeli, andrea@e-mind.com *
You see the email address? Just above your own?
A story.
The old man program was very buggy. I contacted John Eaton and
Zeyd Ben-Halim, took over maintenance and fixed the bugs I had encountered,
and added a lot of stuff. Somewhat later Graeme Wilford fixed more or less
the same bugs add added a lot of different stuff. We talked a bit about
merging but that would require a lot of effort, and I do not think either
of us seriously considers that these days. Some distributions pick man,
other distributions pick man_db. This split causes waste of maintainer
time (or at least caused - man_db-2.3.10.tgz is from 1995, maybe man_db
is not actively maintained anymore), while if we had discovered about
each other's existence somewhat earlier Linux would have had a man program
today that is better than both we have now.
And this split causes other splits again. If you ask for it, man-1.5* will
use a web browser instead of a pager, piping the *roff pages through man2html.
Last time I looked, Debian used an older version of man2html, with different
options.
This is unfortunate. It costs time. It costs money.
It is not true that one does a good thing for Linux by picking a source,
fixing a bug and uploading the result to some web or ftp site.
(and once the unpolite path is been started the only objective
become the real work). I would redo the same now if I would be
in the same context.
I see. Then it is really necessary to educate you.
Every split kills Linux a little bit.
Now according to me the right thing to do is to merge my work on the
official tree and then to delete my tunelp from my ftp area. But I am not
going to send patches in my spare time because I just want to do other
things in my spare time.
I would like if you would merge my tree in the official tunelp yourself,
otherwise ignore me.
Well, I did the merging. But as it turns out Michael prefers to maintain
tunelp himself, so neither of us needs to worry about it anymore, I suppose.
All the best - Andries
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