On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 09:05:35PM +0200, Hubert Feyrer wrote:
> If a patch is applied upstream,
> we can remove it from future versions of a package so we have less work
> to do to maintain the package. Unfortunately, it seems that other
> distributions and packagers don't always do the same. This is true not
> only for Linux distributions such as Debian, Fedora Core, and SUSE, but
> also for maintainers of packages in places like FreeBSD's Ports,
> DarwinPorts or Fink.

On FreeBSD we try to encourage the maintainers to do this, but of course
it doesn't always happen.

IMHO getting the patches upstream benefits everyone.  I think it's
particularly important for the various *BSDs to do this to raise our
visibility so as to counter the perception that some authors hold that
Linux == Open Source.  (There are still cases I hear about where authors
aren't interested in taking FreeBSD's patches, which is too bad.)

I'd also like to encourage people to share patches back and forth between
e.g. NetBSD and FreeBSD -- solving the same problems twice isn't really
particularly interesting :-/

mcl, going back to lurking now