On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 10:02:33PM -0500, Ted Unangst wrote: > Are we still tracking upstream patch in any way? I think we've > diverged in a few places, but there still is an upstream, yes?
I don't think so. Looking at the past, the first version was written by Larry Wall who licensed it to FSF in GPL and to BSD in, well, BSD license. The README's commit states: patch(1) is now free, thanks Larry! Which means that there are at least two license-incompatible versions, the GNU patch and the BSD patch. As we can't use the former, let's look at the latter: FreeBSD stays in sync with our implementation. DragonflyBSD stays in sync with FreeBSD. NetBSD stays in sync with DragonflyBSD/FreeBSD. So, if there is any form of upstream among the larger BSDs, it's our implementation. GNU patch and our patch are kinda sibblings, yet GNU patch has more features than our patch has. The patches I've sent lately mostly apply to our patch only, but there are also bugs that hit the GNU patch version (and some that are exclusive to GNU patch, like using off_t for indexing memory). I've sent one "larger" diff to GNU patch and got asked if I would want to sign a contributor agreement, but no... I'm not interested in that. So before I send these "common" bug fixes to them, I would like to have them published in our patch, first. So they are clearly licensed in our terms and there is no further discussion about it. So whoever reads this: Reviewing my diffs would help me to make faster progress. Will have quite some time for patch development this week and next one, so the amount of diffs will be very likely higher than reviewing can happen. But every small review helps. :) Tobias
