Why fork a library for your own application?

Posted by Mr. Shickadance on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Mr. Shickadance
Published on 2011-04-04T23:02:32Z Indexed on 2012/03/31 11:41 UTC
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version-control

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development-process

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forking

Why should a programmer ever fork a library for inclusion in a widely used application?

I ask this question because I was reading an article about why Chromium isn't packaged for many Linux distros like Fedora. Apparently its largely due to the fact that Google has forked a number of libraries, modified them, and included them in Chromium. This has driven up the complexity of packaging releases. There are a number of reasons why this can be a bad thing, but how strong a case can you actually make for doing so in a large widely used application such as Chromium?

The original article: http://ostatic.com/blog/making-projects-easier-to-package-why-chromium-isnt-in-fedora

Isn't it usually worth the effort to make slight modifications to your own program in order to use a popular and well developed library?

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