Nicolas Williams wrote: > [Dropped case number from subject as this is not an arc comment.] > > On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 10:54:01PM +0100, Andrew Gabriel wrote: >> Alan Coopersmith wrote: >>> Will these changes be made to both the chmod & chown utilities >>> in /usr/bin & /usr/gnu/bin ? >>> >>> (PSARC: do we need to add a best practice/policy that says that >>> new functionality added to /usr/bin tools needs to also be added >>> to /usr/gnu/bin equivalents if they exist to avoid causing >>> problems for users with /usr/gnu/bin first in their $PATH, >>> like the OpenSolaris 2008.05 default user setup?) >> That seems to me like a bad idea, as they won't be gnu any more. >> If it's felt desirable to have the changes in the gnu toolchain, >> then the team should be persuaded to get them accepted upstream, >> and then update the gnu tools in /usr/gnu/bin when that's been >> done. > > s/get them accepted/contribute them/ > > There's no guarantee that an upstream community will accept contributed > changes, nor should a project here be completely limited by what its > upstream community will accept. We should do a best effort to avoid > forks, and to make any forks limited in duration. But we shouldn't have > a blanket rule against forks.
That seems to me like something we definitely should avoid, at least in /usr/gnu/bin, as it's not gnu anymore, and could become incompatible with gnu. Perhaps this is something PSARC should consider in more detail (but not this case). -- Andrew
