[moody__]

There is a direct correlation between the amount of power exerted by a project like Debian over an upstream project, and the amount of effort and upkeep required in doing so. I think of this like a sliding scale between shipping things with zero patches and a full on fork. From my understanding distribution patches on top of upstream projects tend to be typically just bug or portability fixes and stop short of adding features. The point I was trying to communicate was that in order to fully interact with the software you either have to be part of the upstream community or essentially fork.

The illustrate how I think Plan 9 is different in this regard. A patch for 9front could include a new feature for our compilers and then also show how useful it is by using it within other parts of our code. In plan 9 you can interact fully with every component.