[kwlug-disc] the intertoobz never forget

[unsolicited]

Chris Frey wrote, On 10/10/2009 12:02 AM:
> On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 11:32:59PM -0400, Bob Jonkman wrote:
>> Do you mean that making and maintaining changes in isolation is 
>> expensive, but making changes, contributing them back and then having 
>> the community maintain the changes is less expensive? 
> 
> Yes.  Especially with the faster moving projects.  There's a tendency
> for bit rot to occur to lonely patches.
> 
> And always going back to the source code to include your own changes
> eliminates some of the advantage of using a distribution.

But this last implies widespread use of your modifications within your 
organization. I would have expected such changes to be more one off.

And I suspect the wider the distribution of XYZ, the more unlikely you 
are to mess with it in the first place.

So, you might make your own apache app, but you're not likely to mess 
with kde. You might have a custom environment that includes a 
particular kde app, but you're more likely to simply build a 
customized deployment process than change the source. Let alone see it 
through back to source changes and inclusion in future versions.

Or I'm missing something of what you're saying.


I'm mostly thinking about one-off app development here, for internal 
use, rather than an on-going development effort for an evolving app 
that you expect to use and grow with for some significant period of 
time. Is the latter the direction from which you're coming on this?