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12.13.06

Everyone Make Fun of Me

Posted in Fork, FUD, Humour, Novell, Office Suites, OpenOffice at 2:24 am by Shane Coyle

Sorta, I guess…

Some folks disagree with my Novell OpenOffice is a fork statement. I suppose it is a matter of semantics, but when does a "branch" become a "fork"? Even the Wikipedia entry on Software Development Forks interchanges the terms:

In software engineering, a project fork happens when a developer (or a group of them) takes a copy of source code from one software package and starts to independently develop a new package. The term is also used more loosely to represent a similar branching of any work (for example, there are several forks of the English-language Wikipedia), particularly with free or open source software.

A fork that is standard practice in many projects are stable or release versions which are modified only for bug fixes, while a development tree develops new features. This is common practice in the Linux kernel, for instance, but has been misrepresented occasionally in the trade press as the more problematic sort of fork described above.[1] Such forks are often referred to instead as “branches” both to avoid the negative connotations of a fork and because it is closer in intent and function to the common software engineering meaning of branching.

Perhaps it is a case of a captital F versus lowercase f in "(F|f)ork"; So, is Novell’s OpenOffice a development tree with new features ("fork or branch"), or a new package ("Fork")?

I suppose until there is a public rejection of a Novell OpenOffice.org feature by the main OpenOffice.org branch, I will consider Novell OpenOffice.org a "branch".

Thank you, Joshua.

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A Single Comment

  1. Draconishinobi said,

    December 13, 2006 at 11:52 am

    Gravatar

    I think if they start independently developing OpenOffice (their very own version completely independent from the original) then it can be considered a fork. If they merely take OpenOffice as is and patch it, then it would be considered a branch or less actually. This is IMO.

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