search

praekeltfoundation / ways-of-working

How we work. Style guides, tools and conventions.
8 stars 4 forks source link

Maintenance of forked software #44

Open highvoltage opened 10 years ago

highvoltage commented 10 years ago

Some partners fork software in order to fix bugs or add new functionality. Just a few examples include suds, django-queued-storage and photologue.

These forked versions aren't always available or maintained, which break system upgrades or breaks with newer Python versions.

Forked software should either be avoided at all cost or a maintenance plan needs to be in place that ensures that up to date versions of these forks are available for installation.

Currently devops puts out fires caused by this, and it doesn't scale and leads to more problems than it's worth.

Part of this can possibly be fixed by policy in the Ways of Working, but it might need integration in to other Praekelt policies as well.

hodgestar commented 10 years ago

Part of the issues with forks is that they're often not maintained. So perhaps a good baseline rule is "if you fork, you maintain it". Maintaining a fork at a bare minimum probably means 1) giving it a new name 2) have a repository and way to submit patches 3) releases on PyPI whenever there are patches (or wherever we normally get packages of that type from).

highvoltage commented 10 years ago

Great feedback and ideas, thanks @hodgestar