I fully agree on the initial intent and benefit for project dynamic to fork and release custom binaries, the issue is those changes were not proposed upstream and in some cases (winstone for sample) the fork quickly diverged.
As a result we hardly can get upstream improvements, I remember doing such an upgrade for svnkit and this was hard work to get confidence with the resulting codebase. Steven christou was able to switch back to mainstream svnkit which let us upgrade on a regular basis I'm confident Kohsuke and others don't fork unless they see it as the best way to solve the problem and deliver good value to Jenkins users. I believe a fork is usually a response to a gap. The SVNKit example is one that made Hudson (Jenkins) so compelling for me from the very beginning of Hudson(Jenkins). Hudson support for Subversion worked well, whether or not the team maintaining SVNKit at that time had a full or complete solution to the problem. I think the fork was done to benefit me as a user so that I could have a working, integrated, pure Java subversion implementation. I wasn't required to install or configure Subversion on my Windows slave machines. Yes, that focus on users made it harder for developers later, but I think that focus on users was part of what brought Jenkins to being installed on over 100 000 instances. Since the attempt to port to the latest HTMLUnit was challenging, I suspect that means there were significant gaps between what was needed for Jenkins development and what HTMLUnit was providing at the time of the fork. Mark Waite On Sun, Jul 26, 2015 at 9:32 AM Tom Fennelly <[email protected]> wrote: > I spent a while trying to replace the forked HtmlUnit with HtmlUnit 2.17 (PR > #1774 <https://github.com/jenkinsci/jenkins/pull/1774>). I've parked it > for now. I was just running into one issue after another. > > On 26 July 2015 at 11:25, nicolas de loof <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> As long as such a hack is a way to quickly get a fix / feature while a >> pull request is waiting for approval I'm fine with that, but when this ends >> with svnkit-like maintenance hell I'm -1 >> >> Le dim. 26 juil. 2015 12:10, Kanstantsin Shautsou < >> [email protected]> a écrit : >> >>> KK likes forking libraries to add some hacks, ask him. >>> >>> >>> On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 11:16:14 PM UTC+3, Tom Fennelly wrote: >>>> >>>> Anyone have an idea? I'm hoping there was a really good reason, >>>> otherwise I think I might cry. >>>> >>> -- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>> Groups "Jenkins Developers" group. >>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send >>> an email to [email protected]. >>> To view this discussion on the web visit >>> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/885ae71a-39e7-4c48-a78b-44acb5c970a7%40googlegroups.com >>> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/885ae71a-39e7-4c48-a78b-44acb5c970a7%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> >>> . >>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >>> >> > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Jenkins Developers" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/CA%2BbPaoJYZZDayFo6Ynh84Gsed_Jr0q5FAjHJ%2BpGO7D8GuErLRw%40mail.gmail.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/CA%2BbPaoJYZZDayFo6Ynh84Gsed_Jr0q5FAjHJ%2BpGO7D8GuErLRw%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jenkins Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/jenkinsci-dev/CANMVJzmrY5jLiePK0hM%2BMQTqqKv6wNT%3DSTHDjM%3DYDd_Gc37%2B%3Dw%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
