On Thu, 21 Aug 2014, dev wrote:

> Just a question. Should I read between the lines here and guess that the
> curl in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is somehow a fork from the actual golden
> code that I get at http://curl.haxx.se/download/ ?

No, it isn't a fork but yes the Redhat version is rarely identical to the
untouched upstream version.

That change was a bug reported to Redhat that Kamil worked on, made a patch
for and then merged that into our git tree. We get a number of bug reports
through such means, Redhat's bug tracker a good such source but not the only
one. Kamil tends to pick them up for us.

Yes, as you can see in that report Redhat patched their released version and
re-packaged it for their users while we "only" merged it into our dev tree and
relased the fix in our _next_ release. That's a very common practise among
Linux distros, and yes it makes the distros' versions deviate from the
upstream original source tarball (more and more over time as they patch bugs).
They are also known to sometimes backport fixes into older releases so thus a
distro's version B may in fact be improved compared to our "real" version B.

In general this is a good thing: it makes the fix get tested for real sooner
and it helps their users avoid known problems sooner.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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