On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Darren J Moffat <Darren.Moffat at sun.com> wrote: > Garrett D'Amore wrote: >> >> I believe that this case represents a linux familiarity case. While I am >> no happier about the delivery of a separate object with slightly different >> command line switches and operational semantics than anyone else on this >> list, I do believe that we've already long ago established the precedent >> that except for "critical pieces" of the core architecture, we are willing >> to abdicate "good architecture" in favor of "familiarity", except in the >> case of particularly gross violations -- such as cases which would have a >> negative impact on system security or on the usability of other components >> in the system. > > That part can be addressed with a single source and hardlinks so that both > pbzip2 and bzip2 appear in the filesystem. > > The point here is we don't want to waste resources maintaining two copies > when they are so very close to each other.
But they aren't close. We're talking about two independent and subtly incompatible implementations with different behaviour. Simply delivering both directly from upstream not only best satisfies user expectations but is also the lowest maintenance; maintaining our own independent fork is being deliberately incompatible and expensive. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
