Fedora’s philosophy is that their offerings are close to the upstream version of the programs, and changes they make are passed upstream to the project directly. They have minimal modifications to the upstream packages, relying on the projects to make submitted changes.
Ubuntu’s philosophy is, from what I can gather, to make changes to the downstream projects and to pass the changes upstream but to Debian, not necessarily the actual project.
I’m not interested in debating about their philosophy(s).
This is different than openSUSE’s package selection, codec and proprietary practices or the OBS. This has actually little to do with the technical aspects of openSUSE, instead being more on the philosophy and focus behind the development process.
I don’t know if any of this makes any sense.
What is openSUSE’s practice, regarding submitting changes, as well utilizing upstream versions directly with minimal changes to the downstream-only? Are there any samples that demonstrate this?
I suspect openSUSE to be somewhere in-between these two, but I need to defer to somebody who may be more “in the know”.
Everybody aims to submit patches to upstream. If not because it’s the correct thing to do, because it’s just easier if you don’t have to maintain a distro specific patch.
Features that should be upstreamed. Whenever we write this kind of new feature, it is important to coordinate with upstream maintainers. That way, we can develop something that will be accepted upstream without changes. Once a feature is finished, it is a lot of work to rework it to be acceptable to upstream maintainers. As such, it’s better to know from the beginning exactly what upstream maintainers would expect.
Still every packager is mostly independent about its packages. Some will be more predisposed than others to submit upstream. Someone not submitting a patch upstream seems to be the cause we have a broken opensc in 11.3…
> What is openSUSE’s practice, regarding submitting changes, as well
> utilizing upstream versions directly with minimal changes to the
> downstream-only? Are there any samples that demonstrate this?
AFAIK, they apply patches to adjust to our ways, or to correct bugs or improve things. These are
usually submitted upstream, but it is up to the maintainer.
You can “simply” download the sources rpm of a package, and you will see a tar with the upstream
version, plus several patches in separate files. Thus you can add them or not, and rebuild.
> I suspect openSUSE to be somewhere in-between these two, but I need to
> defer to somebody who may be more “in the know”.
You will have to read the packaging list to have an answer from them.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))
openSUSE will apply its own patches to some projects - for example, openSUSE installed KDE4 differently from other distros to allow KDE3 and KDE4 to exist side by side and some things for KDE have appeared in openSUSE before being adopted more widely by KDE. openSUSE has always supplied the Go-OO version of OpenOffice which includes some patches which eventually get into the official version and some which are still excluded. So AFAIK everything is offered but not everything is accepted.
Yeah, I remember the menu system in KDE 3 which was adopted by KDE 4, as well as Go-OO.
But are these signs that it is working with the upstream (KDE and OpenOffice) or that it is forging its own way and in the KDE case, was adopted while the Go-OO is almost a fork (as opposed to the inclusion of the Sun/Oracle “official” OpenOffice.org Fedora includes)?
> Yeah, I remember the menu system in KDE 3 which was adopted by KDE 4,
> as well as Go-OO.
>
> But are these signs that it is working with the upstream (KDE and
> OpenOffice) or that it is forging its own way and in the KDE case, was
> adopted while the Go-OO is almost a fork (as opposed to the inclusion of
> the Sun/Oracle “official” OpenOffice.org Fedora includes)?
OOo is indeed different. It has to, the people working on it have many difficulties getting patches
accepted upstream, because Sun has its own “ideas”. So they have the go “branch” instead.
The intention is be as close to upstream as possible, on as many packages as possible.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))