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On May 3, 2007, at 10:42 PM, Ethan Fremen wrote:
Barry Warsaw wrote:
Of course, I think it /will/ make our lives harder in some ways. As we've seen, folks like cPanel have their own forks that they modify, and then their users come looking to us for support, which we can't give them. Having more public branches out there will increase our support costs.
I would submit that much of what has caused people in the Mailman community to maintain their own forks is because the software
design is insufficiently open, not so much on account of checkin privileges.
It's both I think, and they're related. The link is the FSF
copyright assignment requirement, but that is a can of worms I really
don't want to open up right now. My hope is that a dvcs will allow
us to break that link and let innovation occur independently of the
legal impositions.
Moving Mailman development to distributed trees will force, I suspect, more modularization and extensibility of the code, which will
reduce the need for long-lived, independent forks.
Modularization is a very high priority for me in the next release.
Basically, I suspect that while it might increase support issues in
the short term, it will ultimately reduce the support-to-participant
ratio.
That's my hope too.
- -Barry
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