On August 21, 2014 at 10:12 AM Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se> wrote:
> 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.

OKay, I am pretty familiar with the process as I have been doing this
sort of
thing for a decade now. What always irks me is that some downstream
organization
( I am glaring at Oracle ) will take source code from an open source
project
and then make changes and never release nor feed back the changes. That
always
makes me very curious and also get a bit tin-foil hat concerned.

Red Hat has been, for the most part, pretty damn good and they don't
slide a
back door into communications code. However there are code bits out
there from
other projects that have been viciously forked and then borked ( wodim
is a
good example ).

Dennis
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Received on 2014-08-21