site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com User-agent: Mutt/1.4.1i 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 _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com