Why fork a library for your own application?
- by Mr. Shickadance
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?