Re: What counts as a fork?

[Paige DePol <lual@...>]

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:

>> Actually, the FAQ itself doesn't mention the word "fork" anywhere. It just
>> discusses what to call a derivative language, which is a different issue.
> 
> Oh, I'm using "fork" to mean "incompatible derivative". So we're probably 
> takling about different things. Sorry for the noise.

Ah, I thought that might have been the case! No worries about the "noise",
at least now we're on the same page! :)

The more I think about it the more I like the idea of using "soft fork" and
"hard fork" to disambiguate between compatible and incompatible variants of
Lua, especially when people are discussing Lua variants.

Does this seem like a good idea to anyone else? For example, Soni could say
they are creating Cratera, a soft fork, and we would know that it is Lua
compatible. While I could say I am creating Lunia, a hard fork, and we
would know I am creating a semantically incompatible variant of Lua.

I am currently creating a website to host my power patch collection and one
of the things I will be adding is information about the subject of Lua
forks. Specifically, compatible (soft) and incompatible (hard) forks of Lua
and when the name of the language should be changed.

In each patch I will also place a warning about "hard forks" requiring a
name change, along with a URL to an online tool that will generate a patch
file dynamically. This tool will ask for the new language name, author info,
versioning information, even a new binary signature, it will then create a
patch file to modify their hard fork to create a new Lua language variant.

I hope to have the site up by years end with 10 of my patches to start with.
There are more, but they're not ready to go live yet as I need to update
them to 5.3.4 from 5.3w2 amongst other tweaks. I will post when it is live!

~Paige

PS: I also have a GitHub page, but I wanted a stand-alone site to host the
    patches, the renaming tool, and other miscellaneous files related to Lua.