On 10Mar2011 03:15, Meg <kimada.news@gmail.com> wrote:
| And what is a fork?
The source code for various tools (eg mysql etc) is openly available.
For the mainstream larger tools there will usually be a core group of
people who look after the "master" copy of the course, and who thus
release the "official" version of the tool. Everyone can have access to
the source and can submit changes, but the accepted changes will go
through some central team who keep things sane (QAing changes, rejecting
unwanted changes etc). So as far as outsiders are concenred there is
still one tool.
However, sometimes the community have significant disagreements about
how the main team runs things; control issues or design issues or
different (conflicting) plans for what will happen in the future.
Sometimes these disagreements cause a new team to take the current
version of the code and proceed with development in their own direction;
depending on the nature of the disagreement this may or may not result
in two teams sharing changes with eeach other in the future.
Anyway, now there are two teams, working on two copies of the source
code. This branch in the tree of development is called a fork.
Oracle bought MySQL a year or so ago and some of the community do not
trust Oracle to continue MySQL development in a desirable fashion (since
of course MySQL is a competitor for Oracles core db product). So the
code is being forked, and developed by another team.
Likewise with OpenOffice, LibreOffice is a fork of the main product.
Emacs and XEmacs.
Etc etc.
Cheers,
--
Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/
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- overhead by WIRED at the Intelligent Printing conference Oct2006
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