[conspire] All you need to know about Google software development

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 06:43:44PM -0700:

>    Google is forking existing FOSS code bits for Chromium like a rabbit
>    makes babies: frequently, and usually, without much thought.  Rather 
>    than leverage the existing APIs from upstream projects like icu, 
>    libjingle, and sqlite (just to name a few), they simply fork a point 
>    in time of that code and hack their API to shreds for Chromium to use. 
>    This is akin to much of the Java methodology, which I can sum up as 
>    "I'd like to use this third-party code, but my application is too 
>    special to use it as is, so I covered it with Bedazzler Jewels and 
>    Neon Underlighting, then bury my blinged out copy in my application.". 
>    A fair amount of the upstream Chromium devs seem to have Java 
>    backgrounds, which may explain this behavior, but it does not excuse it.
> 
> http://spot.livejournal.com/312320.html
> 
> (See also:  Android, ChromeOS, Chrome.)

To be fair, look at the Evan Martin blockquote here...

  https://lwn.net/Articles/430118/

Fedora might have the latest version of lib*, but
if you want to distribute a browser to install on
"Enterprise" or "Stable" versions, you're going
to have to bundle modified dependencies for those.
Best that users can realistically hope for is "use
system copy of..." options in the build.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org