divmod-dev team mailing list archive

[Glyph <glyph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Florent,

On Dec 29, 2012, at 9:46 AM, Florent <florent.xicluna@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I did a Big Merge and pushed it on GitHub: it is based on the lp:divmod.org branch and includes all the contributions from the various branches I have identified.

I'm not one of the maintainers you're asking about, but it seems to me like the problem of "too many forks" is rarely addressed well by another fork.

Many of the changes to pyflakes in the forks you've mentioned were never contributed upstream in any way; some of the changes that were contributed upstream have introduced regressions that no one has yet fixed.  Different people have different priorities for their fixes, but PyFlakes is used as (for example) the commit hook on many projects, so introducing new types of spurious errors that need new workarounds is really bad, and of course introducing untested changes that may cause other errors to be missed in some cases is also bad.

Also, although the license technically allows this type of redistribution, none of these authors have recorded their authorship in the license nor have they given you permission, even implicitly, to distribute their work separately without acknowledgement.  Maybe they all meant to license it under some horrible new license but hadn't gotten around to it yet.  Since git encourages you to throw away history, I assume your fork (like all the other forks) has thrown away the record of who did what, and so it will be an impossible mess to sort out whose copyright is whose if a problem arises later.  The somewhat odd shape of the lp:divmod.org repository was a part of a painstaking attempt to preserve all history so that problems like this would _not_ arise.

Although it is up to the maintainers that you've already mentioned, I think that the best way to start here is to ask the authors of the respective changes you want to merge to simply submit their patches upstream.  If they can't even be convinced to do that much then it seems like an effort at collaboration is unlikely to succeed.

-glyph