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Culture of wrappers and workaroundsCulture of wrappers and workaroundsPosted Dec 5, 2008 14:33 UTC (Fri) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640)In reply to: Losses at Mandriva by AdamW Parent article: Losses at Mandriva
> To take a random example, I maintain opensync for Mandriva. I use version 0.22, because it actually freaking works. Fedora has 0.3, because it's a bigger number and KDE 4 expects it to be there (never mind that KDE 4 cannot do anything at all useful with opensync).
This is actually part of the disaster created by distributions. Instead of fixing things (like opensync 0.3), distributors choose to revert to old versions. Or create wrappers/horrible patches.
A great example is X. For years and years distros competed on who had the shiniest XF86Config generator scripts. Each and every distro duplicated that work. Then finally one day upstream went and implemented autoconfiguring. All that duplicated work.. down in history.
Had distributors worked from the beginning withing X to add autoconfiguring and sane defaults instead of attempted to add value to their own distro, how much further would be today?
Distros seem to thrive with the "Dont fix it, workaround it. Or add a wrapper. Whatever you do, don't co-operate with upstream." culture.
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Culture of implementing on crack Posted Dec 12, 2008 15:56 UTC (Fri) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]
> Then finally one day upstream went and implemented autoconfiguring.
...breaking things for everyone. Yes, from modelines to 96dpi on ati and 120dpi screen.
Theory and practice are closer in theory than in practice. And distros are closer to users than upstreams usually. (implementors and supporters are closer yet, so there's at least one more similar round)
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