Re: How should we treat the patches (Re: Debian-JP discussions; lets wrap this up)

[Changwoo Ryu <cwryu@adam.kaist.ac.kr>]

Taketoshi Sano <xlj06203@nifty.ne.jp> writes:

> Many of the patches (not only JP (or ja) related) is written and
> distributed outside of the Debian's world. Many patches is not Debian
> specific, and most of authors of patches have no direct relations 
> with Debian or Debian JP.
> 
> For this reason, I think these patches are "upstream" for us as a unified
> Debian.
> 
> I think you would not say:
> 
>  We (as a unified Debian) should order the autor of xemacs to merge 
>  his code base into the code base of GNU's emacs.
> 
> If the forking is entirely evil, then we should do the effort to merge
> the egcs into gcc, and we should not provide the package of egcs.
> 
> Do you really think that ?
> 
> I think that the forking in upstream is not our responsibility.

The problem of forking is at the "upstreams" you said.  But, so should
Debian just reflect the current situation?  I never think so.  Debian
can be better.

Well, I have maintained a forked version of Texinfo for Korean for
about two years.  So I know in some cases forking is unavoidable by
some technical/political reasons.  Forking is not entirely evil.  But
many (not all) of the Japanese patches have no such a reason.  The
only reason here is lack of communication.

> Some (or many) JP related patch is written without relation to Debian or
> Debian JP Project entirely. They are distributed from some place widely 
> in Japan. So authors of those patch is our "upstream" and their patch
> should not be included in ***.diff.gz in our source package because
> they are not Debian specific change.
> 
> We can ask or advice the author of these patches to contribute his code
> into "their" upstreams, but I think we can not order them to contribute
> his code to our official maintainer for Debian specific purpose.

We could do ourselves.  I think the Social Contract also covers all of
improvements, not only Debian-specific ones.

> What we can do is respect the upstream, and promote this idea. Isn't it ?

-- 
Changwoo RYU