On Fri, Aug 22, 2025 at 12:17 PM Artyom Beilis via Boost < boost@lists.boost.org> wrote:
There are plenty of cases in the community, some more successful and some less so: MariaDB, LibreOffice, Xorg, Firefox. But there are millions of forks that never become something useful and real.
I would like to point out another such example that may be rather relevant.. https://github.com/bfgroup/Lyra -- I tried for some time to get PRs accepted into the original (https://github.com/catchorg/Clara). I even talked to Phil a couple of times about the changes, in person. But even with promises of Phil workin on it nothing ever happened. Hence, I decided to just fork the library. And not only applied my changes, but at this point have rewritten much of it while keeping back compatibility for the core functionality. TO the point that the original project is now explicitly no longer maintained and refers to the new fork as the canonical library. It goes to show that there is some valid impetus for creating forks. The question in the ASIO case is when is "enough is enough" to take the fork in the road? And honestly, I don't have an answer. So instead of talking, start working on your fork. But indeed, the only way to find out is to take the fork in the road. I do grant that this case is very much more complicated. And there are many questions as to what such an ASIO fork means to the Boost collection. Would it be a fork of the standalone ASIO? Would it be only a Boost version? How to synchronize with Chris' ASIO? Should it synchronize? How far would it diverge before you give in and stop trying to merge Chris' ASIO changes? Do you keep trying to upstream changes? -- -- René Ferdinand Rivera Morell -- Don't Assume Anything -- No Supongas Nada -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net