For whom the source tolls?
I've been finding as of late that having a self-maintained source-based distribution of Linux has given me some interesting perspective on the state of affairs in the Linux world. Most notably, the state of source. Obviously, source for Linux is maintained by a variety of groups - the kernel devs maintaint the kernel, the hackers at GNU maintain those essentials like ls and mv, and then the people behind GTK, XFree86, and other large groups give us our big apps. The GNOME and KDE maintainers keep up their software packages. But what happens to everything else? What happens when you depend on something that has fallen through the cracks?
Recently I was on a hunt for netcat - I think I needed it to try out Ettercap on my system. After some searching I discovered that the original developer of that utility had left the project years ago, the only relic being a by-the-way website that I had to find with a little digging IIRC. When I actually tried to use those dated sources, my 2.6 GCC 3 system pooped out on me and wouldn't build it. I then ended up having to travel to Debian land to find a source package which I could use on my system.
So is this a good thing? We all know the distro maintainers like to put in their own little tweaks and nudges to software to keep things going the way they like them. But what happens when distro maintainers start maintaining things that were originally outside their distribution, that they used to just tweak? Take netcat as an example (as that's the only one I've seen so far). What happens if maintenance forks, from the Debian team maintaining one version of the tool to Fedora Core picking up and making their own changes? Will more and more of these small utilities that routinely get rolled up into the distros get dropped by their mantainers and be rather uncerimoniously bequathed to whoever feels like looking after the tools for a distro? Is having the distros look after more of the bits and pieces of Linux independently a good thing? I'd like to hear from everyone else. Do whom do we trust our source?
Recently I was on a hunt for netcat - I think I needed it to try out Ettercap on my system. After some searching I discovered that the original developer of that utility had left the project years ago, the only relic being a by-the-way website that I had to find with a little digging IIRC. When I actually tried to use those dated sources, my 2.6 GCC 3 system pooped out on me and wouldn't build it. I then ended up having to travel to Debian land to find a source package which I could use on my system.
So is this a good thing? We all know the distro maintainers like to put in their own little tweaks and nudges to software to keep things going the way they like them. But what happens when distro maintainers start maintaining things that were originally outside their distribution, that they used to just tweak? Take netcat as an example (as that's the only one I've seen so far). What happens if maintenance forks, from the Debian team maintaining one version of the tool to Fedora Core picking up and making their own changes? Will more and more of these small utilities that routinely get rolled up into the distros get dropped by their mantainers and be rather uncerimoniously bequathed to whoever feels like looking after the tools for a distro? Is having the distros look after more of the bits and pieces of Linux independently a good thing? I'd like to hear from everyone else. Do whom do we trust our source?
