status of ghostscript

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mardi 19 octobre 2004 à 21:57 +0200, Xose Vazquez Perez a écrit :
> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> 
> > I don't know the ESP people, but from my POW their fork could easily
> > turn into something like the ximian oo.o fork (ie a staging area where
> > distros pool patches instead of reinventing the wheel in their little
> > linux corner and massively duplicating efforts).
> > 
> > Of course I may be horribly wrong;)
> 
> the big trouble is AFPL upstream code is not under GPL license so
> it's impossible to merge patches into it. And the only one option
> is to maintain an external patch(or repository) as Fedora or ESP are doing.
> And doing sync with new GPL releases.

This seems much the same problem that with oo.o. Linux distos use a
common fork because it is difficult to get code into the main trunc, and
obviously Sun people work for Solaris StarOffice users first, and Linux
OpenOffice.org users later, so the priorities are not the same.

Similarly getting code into gs require upstream noticing (and getting
authorisation to use) a patch, merge it into their main version, and
_then_ wait for the next version so this one can be freed/gpl'd. Same
problem -> different priorities, long wait -> huge patch queue.

Getting patches in a common free fork would make it easier for upstream
to find them, and provide a common root so fixes can be propagated
quickly among free systems.

Cheers,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot
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