Licensing and technical issues with a Wine package that includes the Mozilla ActiveX Control

* Scott Ritchie 

| On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 12:10 +0100, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
| > * Mike Hearn 
| > 
| > | distributions should be able to patch software as they see fit
| > | likely causing unpredictable side effects?
| > 
| > Yes, that's fairly central to the «free software» idea we're all so
| > fond of.
|
| Obviously, but should it be <<encouraged>> ?

Yes, to a certain degree.  If upstream has one release schedule, your
distribution another, then cherrypicking changes from upstream
CVS/SVN/bzr/git/whatever makes a lot of sense.  You try to get fixes
in, without destabilising feature development.

In some cases, the problems one discover (say, incompatibility with a
particular version of a library) aren't known upstream, are fixed by
upgrading the library or for some other reason aren't fixed upstream.
The distribution may then develop the patches without waiting for
upstream.  In some cases, this will break things, but so will the most
common answer from upstream too: «Have you tried the latest version?»

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
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