Little I dreamed of being like Léguman ... now I eat carrots

Last week I learned about aeroolib a not so friendly fork of relatorio. It left me wondering about how to handle such a situation. Granted relatorio suffered from a lack of attention since I started to work for PCSol, but since I left, I intend to push for a greater integration of it into tryton.

I was disappointed because I never heard of this company using relatorio and all of a sudden they announce that they forked our project and added some nice features. The guy behind this company had posted 2 bugs (one of them after having talk with him in great length on IRC) and never posted any message on our mailing list. One thing amongst other that really got on my nerves was that the new project fixed a (so called) security breach, and they did not warn us about that issue ! And eventhough they did grant us the copyright on our work (they had too, that's why I choose the GPL when writing this piece of software after all) I felt that the collaboration should have been better.

But next time you intend to fork project do it right:

• keep the development history (for such little projects using tailor is a piece of cake), it might prove usefull and you have the opportunity to clearly separate what are your developments and what were the original ones. For now all we have is a big fat commit and it has made our work of patching relatorio more difficult (on a side note : do not comment stuff in your repository, bazaar won't forget those lines you are deleting you know).
• do not, I repeat, do not removed all the test cases : I bet that sooner or later you will have to write them again.
• talk to the maintainers on the mailing list or on IRC about your issues. We now have to libraries, amongst many others, that do opendocument rendering based on genshi templates.

Those little advices will ease our work and yours. A fork, even an unfriendly one, might be mutually beneficient.