On August 21, 2014 at 10:12 AM Daniel Stenberg <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 21 Aug 2014, dev wrote: > > > Just a question. Should I read between the lines here and guess > > that the > > curl in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is somehow a fork from the actual > > golden > > code that I get at http://curl.haxx.se/download/ ? > > No, it isn't a fork but yes the Redhat version is rarely identical to > the > untouched upstream version. > > That change was a bug reported to Redhat that Kamil worked on, made a > patch > for and then merged that into our git tree. We get a number of bug > reports > through such means, Redhat's bug tracker a good such source but not > the only > one. Kamil tends to pick them up for us. > > Yes, as you can see in that report Redhat patched their released > version and > re-packaged it for their users while we "only" merged it into our dev > tree and > relased the fix in our _next_ release. That's a very common practise > among > Linux distros, and yes it makes the distros' versions deviate from the > upstream original source tarball (more and more over time as they > patch bugs). > They are also known to sometimes backport fixes into older releases so > thus a > distro's version B may in fact be improved compared to our "real" > version B. > > In general this is a good thing: it makes the fix get tested for real > sooner > and it helps their users avoid known problems sooner.
OKay, I am pretty familiar with the process as I have been doing this sort of thing for a decade now. What always irks me is that some downstream organization ( I am glaring at Oracle ) will take source code from an open source project and then make changes and never release nor feed back the changes. That always makes me very curious and also get a bit tin-foil hat concerned. Red Hat has been, for the most part, pretty damn good and they don't slide a back door into communications code. However there are code bits out there from other projects that have been viciously forked and then borked ( wodim is a good example ). Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------- List admin: http://cool.haxx.se/list/listinfo/curl-library Etiquette: http://curl.haxx.se/mail/etiquette.html
