On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 06:51:41PM +0200, Markus Hitter wrote:
>
> 1) If you enhanced some GNU or similar licensed code (e.g. bash,
> gcc, ...) you can join this project's community directly. This will
> make the patches go into Mac OS X in the long term, as Apple
> syncronises these projects from time to time.
If an enhancement is in a non-apple codebase, this is the most
reliable way to contribute. If you contribute a patch to a non-apple
maintained project to apple, and apple accepts it, you can almost
guarantee it will not be contributed upstream by apple.
Anyone who has worked with a large organization is aware of the
difficulty in getting approval for locally developed IP to be
appropriately licensed/copyright assigned/etc. to be legitimately
contributed outside the company. While some engineers may bypass
the proper procedure to the benefit of the community as a whole,
the safest thing for the engineer and the company, is to just avoid
that particular hurdle and just not interact with the community at all.
As an engineer, why take the personal risk of being blamed for a leak
(rightly or wrongly) when there is no personal benefit?
> 2) File a bug/enhancement at <http://bugreport.apple.com/> (free
> registration required) and add the patch as an attachment. As a (non-
> paying) ADC Online member, don't expect to hear anything further
> after doing so.
I believe this falls under the heading of "Apple does not comment
on future releases". If you contribute something, Apple will generally
not tell you it will be accepted until it actually shows up in a release,
which can be >1+yr turnaround time, depending one when in the release
cycle (again, release dates, and therefore the release cycle are
confidential, so you can't know them) the development effort is.
The rationale for this as explained to me is, the company does not want
the liability of telling someone authoritatively or even creating the
expectation that something will be in a product when it may be cut at
the last minute or removed for other reasons.
While it may seem reasonable that the company wants to protect its self,
it makes external development of apple developed bits virtually impossible.
This means if your patch is not accepted, you will likely never hear
anything back ever again.
> 3) In principle, there's OpenDarwin.org as well and they maintain a
> small set of patches, too. Currently they concentrate on getting
> Darwin built at all and are trying to avoid functional changes as
> this would imply a fork off from Apple's Darwin.
OpenDarwin has for the most part abandoned doing development of
Darwin. There are many reasons for this, most of them already
hashed out at length, repeatedly, on this list and elsewhere.
OpenDarwin.org's main purpose (and from a practical standpoint
has always been this way) is to provide resources for open source
development FOR darwin and Mac OS X (as opposed to development OF
those systems). Meaning, we host and facilitate related projects,
such as darwinports, xar, darwinbuild, portions of fink, etc.
Rob
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