Indeed - I should say that this isn't just a podling thing. It's a general development issue, but it's something that I think is typically one that might often appear during podling time as a company (like Oracle) figures out how to integrate its internal release cycle with the open source world.
Copying to an internal repository is, of course, the inevitable workaround if the Powers That Be say that this practice is not acceptable; my Open-Source-Developer gripe with that would be that it doesn't actually benefit the open source project to require this. It just forces more development to happen behind the scenes in private... -- Adam On 8/14/06, Craig McClanahan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 8/14/06, Adam Winer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hey all, > > For some of our internal, non-open source work here at Oracle, > we're heavily depending on Trinidad (yay!). The catch is that, > at certain points, we need a stable branch to build off of and > apply only limited bug fixes so that internal work never gets > destabilized. > > What I'd like to do is create branches in the Subversion repository > for Trinidad code, with the following commitments: > - No proprietary, non-Apache code will *ever* be checked in to > such branches. > - No work will happen on these branches that has not *first* > been checked into trunk, with the possible exception of deeply > hacky bug patches that wouldn't be wanted on a trunk. > > In other words, this will still be public work, and never even > anything that could be construed as a fork in any way. > > Does this seem reasonable? Is it legit by Apache rules? > > All the alternatives I can think of are even less legit - e.g., we > could make an internal copy of the source code, but that just > reduces our exposure to the internal work and makes it less > straightforward for us to hew to the true code on the trunk. I went back and asked what we (Sun) do with various artifacts we depend on (such as bits from Tomcat). Back in CVS days (where a branch was pretty expensive), we did some Sun-specific tags when we grabbed a snapshot, but then we put that code in an internal mirror repository and did our builds against that (plus any point fixes that were necessary). In an Subversion world where branches like this would be really cheap, I don't see a problem as long as the other committers are OK with it. But hey, I work for a company that might like to be able to do this too :-). It definitely seems like something worth asking on the Incubator general list (so that it eventually ends up as guidance for new podlings) but perhaps more broadly as well because it certainly matters for existing projects as well. I'll ping a couple of appropriate aliases so we can get broader feedback on this. -- Adam > Craig
