On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 08:50:50AM -0700, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > Nicolas Williams wrote: > >On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 08:14:55AM -0400, James Carlson wrote: > > > >>I think the ARC would be derelict in its duty if it simply said "FOSS > >>means no expectation of source change." That may be true of some > >>projects, but certainly not of others, and the ARC should not be > >>presuming one magic answer for all cases. > >> > > > >Hmmm. Let me try again. > > > >For standalone utilities like Unison I don't agree. The ARC can > >reasonably ask lots of things (like that it be Secure By Default), but > >there's a fine line between asking for reasonable changes and killing > >the project. > > > >I think for libraries the ARC can and should be a lot more inquisitive, > >and potentially require many more changes. > > > >For core OS features the ARC should treat FOSS as any other Sun project. > > > > How does the consumer (in this case the user) know whether unison is a > "core OS feature", or some integration of perhaps lesser-quality or > otherwise inferior FOSS? >
sigh. i'm really tired of this silly debate. this is simply my $0.02 and i probably won't reply to any replies to it. i'm actually more interested in the actual case at hand vs the general good vs bad software issue (which i think barts previous comments addressed wonderfully). you categorization of unison as "inferior FOSS" is totally subjective and inappropriate. unison is a wonderful tool that does exactly what it was designed todo. i'm a huge fan of high-quality software (go read my bug reports if you don't believe me) and i've been using unison on a daily basis for many years now. if you think that unison is "inferior" because it doesn't support all the features -you- want (like hard links) then it's FOSS, feel free to go change it. of course i've done lots of system administrator too, and guess what? when i needed to migrate data around that may have contained hard links then i didn't use unison. thankfully there are plenty of other tools available that. see: rsync, ufsdump/ufsrestore, etc. so please, stop judging the "quality" of some piece of software based on your personal feature set preferences. ed
