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Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2015 17:18:56 +0200 (CEST)
From: Roland Lutz <rlutz AT hedmen DOT org>
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Subject: Re: [geda-user] About reinventing the wheel, and how to avoid it
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On Fri, 11 Sep 2015, John Doty wrote:
> things like gnet-spice-noqsi have *zero* impact on what you˘re doing. 
> That˘s a consequence of good factoring.

In the context of Free Software, a model where people contribute their 
code back upstream usually turns out to work better.  Where's the 
difference?  If your code is in the main codebase, other users can find 
it, and even more importantly: the developers are aware of it.

If there is for example an API change, a simple grep will reveal the 
problematic code line; the developer can fix it right in the same commit.

You may have noticed that I included your spice-noqsi backend, along with 
Igor2's dump backends, in the Xorn repository.  (Thanks for putting it 
under the GPL which made this possbile!)  I had a twofold motivation for 
that: by including these backends in the regular test suite, I could be 
sure I didn't break anything by accident; and after updating fourty other 
backends, it was much easier (and less error-prone) for me to update 
another one than if I had ignored and left that task to you.

In the end, everyone benefits from such a model: the contributors aren't 
left alone with their incompatible code (see Firefox for a negative 
example on that), the users have non-bitrotten code even long after the 
original contributor has left the project, and the developers need to 
worry much less about what code outside the repository may break with a 
change.

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