Re: Second shot at PAM
On Sun, Oct 29, 2000 at 01:37:21AM -0400, Igor Khavkine wrote:
> It depends on the scope of the patch. If it's only aimed at the debian
> source package, then everything is fine because it in no way affects
> builds on non-hurd systems since they'll probably be taken from the
> original source release. If it's aimed to be submitted upstream, then
> you're right.
All patches are aimed at upstream. Debian only patches are bad, we want to
distribute software, not fork it.
> However it's up to the upstream maintainers to decide
> what level of POSIX compatibility they want to maintain. If they
> are willing to get rid of MAXPATHLEN alltogether I'd be willing to
> help since i've already done that for hurd. But again, that's up to
> them.
OTOH, you make it harder for them to make this decision. When they see such
a patch, they may think: "What's this __GNU__ for an obscure system? We are not
going to add lots of little #ifdefs and uglify our code for it. This is
broken"
But if you send them a patch which is obviously feature based and tell them
that this fixes the POSIX incompatibility of the code and makes it run on
the Hurd, too, it is easier to get your patch included soon.
Anyway, if an author doesn't bother about POSIX, but adds __GNU__ patches to
support the Hurd system, there is something seriously wrong.
Thanks,
Marcus
--
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de
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