[sugar] Relationships w/ upstream.

[Martin Langhoff]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 6:17 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:
> I think we're all agreed that even small forks have large long-term
> costs, and we'd prefer to avoid them where at all possible -- which we
> all agree seems to be the case at present.

Here I disagree - small and medium sized forks can be low cost, and
highly dynamic, specially when you are using a merge-friendly SCM
(git!).

The last 6 years of my life have been working with projects that ran
ahead of their upstreams -- mostly moodle -- and things were horribly
painful before git. Once git was usable, it just became a matter of a
bit of discipline.

- Long term forks are death, short term forks are opportunity.

- Sugar isn't a forking problem :-) as olpc team and sugar team
overlap significantly.

- I think we are overstressing about a bunch of strings. People
rightly say that forks are costly and nightmarish, but they are
talking about a few thousand patches, and deltas of 10K lines, that
when merged resulted in a few hundred gnarly conflicts. Strings you
say? I landed 130 patches worth 4K lines of diff between 1.8 and 1.9
of moodle, rewriting one of the core libs completely :-)

cheers,




m
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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