status of forks

[Peter Robinson]

>>> 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.

I believe there are now patches floating around to enable this at
runtime. See the changelog for the Fedora package
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/telepathy-salut/devel/telepathy-salut.spec?view=markup

> 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).

Yes, but if/as development goes upstream there's no reason why you
couldn't use rawhide and go more towards a Fedora style release which
is close to the joyride/9.x release style anyway.

Peter