On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:03 AM, Alexander Gladysh
<agladysh@gmail.com> wrote:
> <...>
> Also, we should officially discourage duplication of libraries. It's
> confusing for the user. As an example, there were at least two signal
> handler libraries written and distributed on luaforge (disclaimer: I
> was one of those authors). This is necessary if we want to work with
> LuaRocks; it makes no sense to have multiple libraries that do the
> same thing (with some minor variations that could be concatenated into
> a single library).
I disagree.
We should not discourage duplication, we would just stop duplicators
from using our service. "Not invented here" syndrome is strong in many
programmers minds. You often may gather useful insights from the
duplicate — why was it written? what is the difference?.
After all, who and how would decide that given two libraries are duplicates?
Instead of discouraging duplication, we should encourage (but not
force) cooperation between authors.
Look at GitHub. You may create your own fork of any open-source
project, thus creating a duplicate. You develop your fork
independently. With Git you may (relatively) easily backport changes
from upstream to your fork. If you want to, GitHub makes it easy to
tell original author to pick up your changes and consider them for
merging (send a "pull request").
Alexander.
