status of forks

[Morgan Collett]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:47, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I see two classes of forks
>>
>> 1. forks to use different compile/packaging options to eliminate
>> dependancies
>>
>> 2. forks to change the code (adding functionality in particular)
>>
>> I'm not _that_ interested in #1, but am very interested in #2, especially
>> anything done to make things work with the XO hardware.
>
> I don't think there are any other than the kernel that are forked for
> hardware issues, and the stock Fedora i386 kernel will work with the
> XO but the likes of numerous ethernet/storage drivers, ISA, MCA, Token
> Ring and the like are of little use for the device :-) . There use to
> be a HW issue in the shipped gstreamer that caused it be be forked but
> I'm not aware of any other hardware issues in mainline kernel issues.

Another reason for forks is Rainbow.

telepathy-gabble and telepathy-salut both had OLPC-3 branches for
8.2.x and have OLPC-4 branches for 9.1.0 because Rainbow runs
activities under different UIDs and they all need to connect to gabble
and salut - so there are two patches for each of these to weaken the
usual UID restrictions. This weakens dbus and socket permissions on a
multiuser system, so the patches are only suitable for running under
Rainbow and upstream Telepathy won't merge them into releases.

Since these are build-time patches, I'm not sure how you would remove
this fork - since regular F-10 and F-11 shouldn't have the patches,
but Rainbow requires them.

Oh, and one more reason for forks/branches: F-10 shipped with Sugar
0.82.x, but [the release formerly planned as 9.1.0] would have Sugar
0.84.x (and has 0.83.x packages in OLPC-4 now for testing on Joyride).

Regards
Morgan