On Mon, 2021-03-22 at 15:19 -0500, Glenn Washburn wrote: > On Mon, 22 Mar 2021 16:16:26 +0000 > Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> wrote: > > > On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 04:20:00PM +0100, Daniel Kiper wrote: > > > NAK for this patch and others "fixing" small MBR gaps. I am not > > > going to deal with this kind of issues any longer because a few > > > folks in the world cannot/do not want/... reinstall their > > > systems. Sorry guys. > > > > I'd just like to say that I think this is an unfortunate mistake, > > and puts distributions in an invidious position. > > Forgive my ignorance, this seems like a fairly simple patch. While I > personally do not like maintaining patches just solely for myself, my > understanding is that distros are quite accustomed to carrying > patches for very long periods of time (indefinitely?). Is part of the > push back because its onerous for distro/package maintainers? Or is > this more a coming from a matter of principal?
The point of an open source upstream is to provide a code base from which users can build things. That's why most upstreams aren't simply code dumps, but are buildable projects. Since most users don't build things any more, distributions serve as the build and delivery mechanism for the majority. This means that in an ideal world the upstream and the distributions that package them have a synergistic relationship. Ideally any patch which is useful to more than one distribution should be in the upstream, so in the ideal model the upstream serves as a communication and synchronization point for distributions even if they serve greatly differing markets and open discussion of these differences helps the upstream determine the best form of any proposed change which often provides great synergy when a common and agreed upon resolution is achieved because the distributions are reflecting the needs of their users back into the upstream and the upstream is, in turn, responding and refining the inputs. In the real world, of course, there are a variety of dysfunctional upstream to distro relationships for reasons as varied as philosophical differences to personality clashes. However, when the relationship becomes dysfunctional it's usually the everyone (including the upstream) who suffers. James _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
