The value of middlemen
The value of middlemen
Posted Aug 12, 2004 8:01 UTC (Thu) by mbp (subscriber, #2737)Parent article: The value of middlemen
It might be nice if the Linux distributors made a single Linux fork, rather than making every version a bit different...
Posted Aug 12, 2004 11:15 UTC (Thu)
by wookey (guest, #5501)
[Link] (4 responses)
There are good reasons why Red Hat and Debian (for example) are not identical. Nevertheless they are highly compatible and you can generally use either if all you want is a 'linux system'. Choice is not a bad thing - it's good, and choice is not incompatible with interoperability.
Which one, overweening, system would you have us all use?
Posted Aug 12, 2004 12:14 UTC (Thu)
by ewan (guest, #5533)
[Link] (2 responses)
There are good reasons why Red Hat and Debian (for example) are
not identical. [...] Which one, overweening, system would you have
us all use?
Posted Aug 13, 2004 0:42 UTC (Fri)
by bignose (subscriber, #40)
[Link] (1 responses)
A case in point for the confusion caused by saying "Linux" when one means "GNU".
Posted Aug 13, 2004 2:44 UTC (Fri)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link]
This is a rare case where the relevant characteristic of the systems in question is a matter of the Linux kernel. One of the issues is the way the user identifies the CDROM drive and how the program accesses it. That's pure Linux kernel.
Neither that nor the other issue -- DVD writing -- seem to have any connection to GNU software.
Posted Aug 17, 2004 5:08 UTC (Tue)
by mbp (subscriber, #2737)
[Link]
When, as is apparently the case here, the upstream developer simply will not take patches that almost everyone else agrees is a good idea, then it's time to fork. There *is* a time and a place for forking.
(If it turns out that the author was right, the patches were a bad idea, and nobody uses them... well, that's life. But I don't think that would be the case here.)
It would hardly be the first time. Somebody else mentioned XFree86. An even more relevant example is OpenSSH: when the original maintainer went off into a proprietary development, a fork arose and all the distributions adopted it.
If somebody forked cdrecord into a free version that could record DVDs I think that would be great too.
The choice here is not between zero forks and one fork. It is between one open fork, or alternatively every distribution applying different random patches.
>> Which one, overweening, system would you have us all use?
The one which allows you to say "cdrecord dev=/dev/cdrw". Is that so unreasonable?
No it wouldn't. And I don't think you mean 'fork' either - distributors try hard not to actually fork things.The value of middlemen
No it wouldn't. And I don't think you mean 'fork' either -
distributors try hard not to actually fork things.
The value of middlemen
Most of the time, but sometimes it's necessary, as it was with the
XFree86 - X.org change.
One shared linux friendly fork of cdrecord, not one version
of linux. It would be silly if everybody was independently patching
cdrecord to fix the same problems, but I don't think that actually
happens too much since they can all lift patches from each other.
That said it's possible that the pain of a full-blown fork might be
less than the pain of dealing with Jörg....
> > There are good reasons why Red Hat and Debian (for example) are notThe value of middlemen
> > identical. [...] Which one, overweening, system would you have us all
> > use?
> > One shared linux friendly fork of cdrecord, not one version of linux.
I don't think this is a case in that point.
special "Linux" version
I actually do mean "fork".The value of middlemen