On Mon, 13 May 2002, Nick Gimbrone wrote:

> > How about making a session in libcurl site which contains some 'extra'

> I'd respond the reason is that such a seciton proves nothing about the
> value of such optional support... many of us do not build from source...
> and don't want to build from source...

The idea of a 'patch section' does not take away the need for incorporating
all good patches into the main sources. It does however offer people a place
to submit their patches, without having to bother about it going into the
main sources or not. Some patches might be experiemental, some patches might
be deemed not-good-for-main (see that old Netsaint-curl patch flying around
the net for an example of such a one).

The patch section would be a place to submit them. Some of them would remain
there, some of them would get applied and inserted in to the development and
some of them would be be discarded completely.

If the section idea works, that is. I'm not convinced that it will.

> as we have other tasks to accomplish rather than chasing down an optional
> piece of support (that if we had only known about it by virtue of it being
> in the base) we would have benefited from!

Well, imagine if some great hacker without nothing better to do produces a
very elegant patch that introduces feature Y while I don't agree that Y is
libcurl's business, then that is most likely the way you'd go ahead and get
feature Y in your libcurl. (Until I've been beaten up by the hoards of
complaining users who forces me to change my mind to actually include feature
Y.)

> If it is worth doing (and in this case I do think that it is), then it is
> worth doing right and making available in the main line (not some hidden
> obscure side-spur).

One idea that we could do when having them as patches in a separate section,
is to get users' support for various patches before getting them applied on
the main sources. It would prevent us from applying patches that don't have
enough user demand.

I appreciate your input.

-- 
    Daniel Stenberg -- curl groks URLs -- http://curl.haxx.se/
_______________________________________________________________
Have big pipes? SourceForge.net is looking for download mirrors. We supply
the hardware. You get the recognition. Email Us: bandwidth_at_sourceforge.net