Re: Code forks, RH & Debian (was Re: [OT] Process on which processor)
On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 05:56:19PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 17:50, Colin Watson wrote:
> > Be careful of applying the words "older" and "newer" to procps. There
> > are two forks of its codebase, and I don't think their version numbers
> > track each other.
> >
> > It wouldn't be the first time that Red Hat and Debian have ended up for
> > various historical reasons on two different branches of a fork: man and
> > man-db come to mind, but at least there the packages have different
> > names.
>
> Ok, I'll bite:
> Why do Debian and RH track different branches of extremely common
> "packages" like top and man?
Historical reasons, as I said. :) Six years ago it wasn't always obvious
that the other branches existed, and even if it was people just picked
whatever implementation looked best when they were putting together a
distribution. There wasn't necessarily any overriding reason back then
why Debian and Red Hat should have picked the same implementation of
everything, or even necessarily been particularly aware of what the
other was doing. Since then you often find that the branches have
diverged too far apart to be simply merged, and both have had different
features added which people want; switching branches would lead to
people being surprised by features disappearing.
It's unfortunate, but there you go. Competition is occasionally healthy.
Since it's all free software, the best thing to do is to try to merge as
much as possible.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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