[sugar] Relationships w/ upstream.

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 5:29 PM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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!).

I have at various times longed for a way to make small forks from
upstream less painful, so that we can use them more aggressively.
But, putting on my other hat (the "Dennis" hat), I'd say that there's
a big difference between "no fork" and "some fork", even though (as
you point out) there may be very little difference between a small and
medium fork, once you've got one.  There's a lot of mental and
bookkeeping overhead to make sure that your small fork stays in place,
gets updated properly, that end users can distinguish between the
forked version and upstream when they do maintenance or development,
etc, etc.

> - I think we are overstressing about a bunch of strings. People

We are probably overstressing.  And I probably overreacted on IRC,
triggering the conflict in the first place.  We all seem to agree now,
at least. =)
 --scott

-- 
 ( http://cscott.net/ )