RedHat forks OpenSSH?

[Damien Miller]

Paul Iadonisi wrote:

>   As far as support goes, it is obviously fully within the rights of the
> OpenSSH team to disown this so-called fork.  Red Hat doesn't *support*
> Fedora Core, anyhow, and isn't likely to tell RHEL customers to 'go to
> the OpenSSH team' for OpenSSH support.
>   So I'm with Seth, here.  Even only a *cursory* look at the source rpm
> (which the OpenSSH team appears to have done, hence this heavily
> cross-posted message) easily reveals what Red Hat has done.  Nothing
> clandestine about it at all.  This should have been dealt with through
> the other channels Seth has mentioned instead of assuming the worst and
> blasting a message to four mailing list, including one (fedora-list)
> with many inexperienced users (that's why a lot of them are on the
> list...for help) who may end up quite frazzled by it.  Makes one wonder
> if that was the intention.
> 

I'm not suggesting that Redhat has made clandestine changes, any such
changes aren't really clandestine when they can be revealed with "diff".
I am saying that we don't have the time (or the desire) to go and check
what changes RedHat make to their tarball for each release. Patches are
easy: they are instantly readable and most of them don't change from
release to release anyway.

Given the choice of improving OpenSSH vs. chasing up hidden vendor
changes motivated by a misguided legal department before I can determine
whether a bug report is valid, I know which will always win.

Some people have taken offence to my cross-posting, I don't understand
why; my original message is of relevance to openssh users, Fedora users
and Fedora developers - the very lists that I posted to.

-d