[usea]

I don't want to speak with any authority on this subject since it's mostly foreign to me. However, I will say that your explanation comes with a pretty big assumption: that a library sits on some 2-dimensional spectrum from bad to good. If you don't subscribe to this notion, libraries don't improve; they simply change. If you accept this, then you begin to see why arbitrarily changing parts of a software package without even trying to understand the consequences of those changes is madness.

I'm not saying I disagree with you, just trying to point out a spot you might have overlooked.

[sounds]

Ok, I definitely have a bias toward what the grandparent is saying: flatten the hierarchy.

But just from a logical standpoint, couldn't you apply the following equally to the Riak guy who is complaining: "arbitrarily changing parts of a software package without even trying to understand the consequences of those changes is madness"

It absolutely is madness. If the Riak guys want to use leveldb in a way Google won't support, they should rally with the package managers and get Google to stop being "pretend open source." (Hint, Google: just releasing the source doesn't work if you ignore all bug reports and patches from outside.)

I suspect the real issue here is too much "Not Invented Here" syndrome by all parties involved.

[zaphar]

That's silly. Leveldb is totally open source in every sense of the word. Just because you want to customize it in a way they didn't originally customize it doesn't mean they are "pretending" open source. The fact that they are allowed to customize it in their own custom fork is largely because google is not "pretending".

There are plenty of reasons to ignore patches from outside that are completely valid. Google gets to decide the direction of their fork of leveldb. If a patch doesn't fit that direction they are under no obligation to accept it.

It's not madness for Riak to want a divergent version of a package. Nor is it madness for the package maintainer not to desire to take that package in the direction that Riak wants to. This is why there we have forks in the first place and it's perfectly fine.

In short. No it doesn't equally apply to the Riak guy. The package is responsible for cutting boundaries in the proper place if they don't want to do the work investingating that then they shouldn't package it.

[drewcrawford]

> If the Riak guys want to use leveldb in a way Google won't support, they should rally with the package managers and get Google to stop being "pretend open source."

They don't have any control over Google, by "rallying" or otherwise.

Consider the recent case of the WebKit/blink split. Here you have two sets of some of the world's smartest engineers, who cannot agree about how to render a webpage! And this is a well-defined problem. There are actual standards about how to render webpages! In theory, everybody agrees about what's going on here, and yet it's fork time.

As for what Library X does, there are no standards, and not necessarily does anybody agree about what they are building. And let's be honest here, you probably do not have WebKit-caliber developers hacking on Library X. So the chance that you can arrive at consensus for Library X is much lower than for WebKit/blink.

Meanwhile, instead of dicking around with the will-they-wont-they-merge-upstream committee, you can just ship software that works in practice to people that want to use it. If you are a software developer, and you have the choice between writing software and arguing about it, it is usually a good bet on average to write software.