Re: [tdf-discuss] Oracle Contributor Agreement and LibreOffice contributions

Hi Kohei,

Kohei Yoshida wrote (18-02-11 02:07)
> On Thu, 2011-02-17 at 23:44 +0100, Cor Nouws wrote:

> > Reading Christophes question though, I see the route that people
> > contribute code both to LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.
> > It is right that this (which indeed is perfect possible) will give extra
> > work for the people contributing, but I do not see why that should
> > create extra work for LibreOffice, since the code already has been
> > contributed here.
>
> It does create extra work for us.  Case in point, there was a fix for
> the filter performance issue that the reporter reported both to us and
> to OOo
>
> http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=116164
>
> They decided to fix it for 3.3, and I was already working on the same
> fix right after the reporter reported here.  Naturally we ended up
> solving this differently, merging theirs into ours causes all sorts of
> conflicts, and resolving that was not trivial.  I ended up removing my
> changes, pull their changes in, removing their changes again (since it
> caused regression), and re-worked it from scratch.
>
> Now, that was slightly different case since it didn't involve a patch.
> And you might think that, if someone submitted a patch both to our
> project and OOo project, it shouldn't cause any merging conflict.
> That's in fact how I interpreted your above statement.

Correct.

> But in reality when a patch is being integrated, in most cases the patch
> does not get integrated as-is; they may do some follow-up changes to
> cover more cases, and we may do the same.  They may make a small
> follow-up change, or they may entirely re-work the patch and do
> completely different.  Worse, they may make changes in areas that are
> far removed from the areas where we make changes, in which case merging
> their changes into ours will not cause conflict, but it will cause
> issues in run-time behaviors.  Discovering that may take months, or
> sometimes years.
>
> So, as Michael says, I'm not a big fan of people submitting patches to
> both projects.  And yes, it will create extra work for us but not
> necessarily for them since we pull their changes but they don't pull
> ours.
>
> Having said all this, we can't stop people contributing to both
> projects.  It's their choice and it's their basic freedom.  But it does
> create extra work for us, that much is for sure, speaking from
> experience.

Thanks for this extensive answer. Indeed I know the example from 
i#116164, but did not have the idea that there is a more general 
considerable risk with patches and changes, apart from the fact that of 
course pulling from another code base always involves work.

But you made the point more clear. Thanks for that.

Cor


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