Re: ncurses 4.1

(Hoping all of the people in the To: list are on the ncurses list)

I think it's instructive to compare this with the XEmacs thing. In
that case, users who disagreed with RMS about the direction of the project
*did* fork. There are a lot of XEmacs users. There are a lot of
Emacs users. Most of the time, they remain on good terms and exchange
patches.

Look also at the *BSD's; we're up to three free versions of 4.4BSD,
which have split over issues like this.

The concern I mostly have here is that, in the other cases, the split
or divergence of views is marked by a name change. Perhaps Eric
should release encurses, or Tom should release dncurses?

In any event, I would say that there's ample evidence that splits can
and will survive, and it looks like this is a typical kind of thing
over which people split. Normally, this means that the "fork" chooses
a new name. I'm not sure which maintainer would be the "fork" in this
case; traditionally, the most active maintainers are the main branch,
and traditionally, the most senior maintainers are the main branch.

-s
Received on Mon Jun 02 1997 - 14:19:03 EDT