From my personal experience deviating from upstream
intended/accepted behaviour is the topmost reason
for an endless sequence of subsequent issues that
http://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=921714
http://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=921714#c8
Johannes Meixner changed:
What |Removed |Added
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CC| |jsmeix@suse.com
--- Comment #8 from Johannes Meixner ---
Only an addendum FYI:
I do strongly recommend to never deviate in any way
from upstream intended/accepted behaviour.
pile up into a monstrosity of "patches" that pervert
a software package into a totally unmaintainable mess.
We had such a totally unmaintainable mess with grep in the past
and it was duwe@suse.de who finally did the only right thing
to clean it up by a reset to full compliance with upstream, cf.:
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$ osc cat Base:System grep grep.changes
...
Thu Jul 22 15:45:31 CEST 2010 - jsmeix@suse.de
- Forwarded the below "upgrade to grep-2.6.3" to openSUSE:Factory.
This is also a reset to full compliance with upstream.
All our own patches and "speedups" were dropped in the below
"upgrade to grep-2.6.3" because they had bad side effects
like bnc#618455 (SLES11-SP1) and bug#616037 (SLES9-SP4)
which do not happen with an upstream compliant grep
(regardless of an old version 2.5.1 or the new 2.6.3).
- On Fri Apr 9 16:43:45 CEST 2010 duwe@suse.de did a version
upgrade to grep-2.6.3, which brings among various compile fixes
vast improvements for UTF-8 / multibyte handling.
Fixes bnc#255977 (SLES10-SP2) and bnc#415228 (SLES9-SP3).
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In general:
Maybe worth a mention everywhere:
"When you use tools, in particular when you use them in a special way,
read the documemntation so that you really know how the tool behaves.
Otherwise you may get unexpected results. When you get unexpected
results, read the documemntation so that you really know how the tool
is meant to be used and what the intended behaviour of the tool is."
An example from my personal experience what I am talking about:
In the past I got several complaints and "severe bug" reports
about "grep does not behave as expected" where the root cause
was that the users did not understand the meaning of "locale".
They all had called grep in a non-POSIX locale but expected
POSIX-conformant behaviour. Because of this I made
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Plain_Text_versus_Locale
Before that happened instead of telling the users how to use grep
what we had done was adding our own "patches" and "speedups"
to make it "behave better" but in the end that had introduced
real bugs in grep. Then I was made maintainer of grep but I
(and apparently also all others) were unable to maintain that
monstrosity that we had made of grep until duwe@suse.de
had put an end to that wrong way.
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