On Thu, Aug 14, 2014 at 8:48 PM, Óscar Fuentes <[email protected]> wrote:

> The bug is about an specific CMake module when used with certain input
> and the zone touched by the patch is several years old, so we can assume
> that the problem is far from being a common one. There is no reason for
> hurry.
>

I have no interest in getting in a long philosophical discussion on the
matter so this will be my last post...

As far as there being no reason to "hurry", I can't build my program today
with the bug, the patch fixes the bug for me. Specially with cmake
upstream, I've found bugs that have been reported for over a year without
any action upstream, so sorry if I'm in a "hurry". They seem to work on
what they care about. Which is unfortunate since overall I really like the
product and much prefer it to autotools.


OTOH when you apply a patch you are forking the project. This has severe
> consequences for the community (and creates extra work for the
> maintainers.) Right now MSYS2 CMake has a single, simple patch which is
> related to MSYS2 itself, while your patch addresses a CMake bug which is
> not MSYS2-specific. The moment Alexey applies it, he is taking the role
> of CMake maintainer. Multiply this by the hundreds of packages MSYS2
> has...
>

I'm a Fedora and RPM Fusion maintainer and I maintain dozens of packages (I
really need to count it up sometime). Probably about 50% of them require
some level of patching to build properly or to comply with the packaging
guidelines. This is pretty normal. Some of them I get upstreamed, others
they have no interest in, life goes on.

If you're going to limit yourself to a distribution or packages without any
disto level patches you're going to have to come up with your own distro
and it will have a very limited selection of libraries and programs.

Calling the addition of a patch a fork of an entire project is a rather
extreme viewpoint.


IMHO MSYS2 should limit itself to patches required by the specific needs
> of this environment (and perhaps some MinGW-w64 patches.) Broadening the
> scope is a recipe for maintainer burn-out.


Sometimes maintaining patches, especially large ones can be a PITA, which I
try to avoid, once again, life goes on. At the end of the day it's about
having access to software that does what you need it to. Having a canonical
upstream distribution that doesn't work serves no one.

Thanks,
Richard
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