why so many forks?

[rek2]

like Im preparing myself to help out with some code here and there but started to notice that some features like groups are already been work on other forks.. but

those forks are not getting merge into the main tree and there is no plans for it.. so we have people having pods with different forks because they want those features..

that is all good I believe in free software, now what I will like to understand is why those features were not build or merge on the time into the main tree?

usually a fork on a FLOSS app will happen when there are major discrepancies between two groups of developers.. what is going on inside diaspora that

I have to jump between forks to find the features I need/want instead of working all tors the same release? I will like to donate time/code to the main tree

but Im starting to find that some features my friends/users of my pod are asking for are not on the main diaspora tree.. this is why I decided to help add them

but is there a reason why people started to fork into their own projects ? do the key devs do not want groups or any other features in diaspora? to many questions sorry

but will like to know the political motivation of all partys for this to happen already on a 2 year old project that is still alpha.

Thanks

Cf.

[Sarah Mei]

I'm not sure what fork-maintainers' motivations are, other than customizations that we can't (for whatever reason) roll into the main codebase. I was expecting to see more pull requests from the forks actually, but I don't think we've gotten one yet.

Personally, I think forks are a great place to try out new features that don't meet our testing and/or code-quality standards, as with the chat feature for example. If they're popular, and prove usable, we can think about rewriting them and rolling them in.

[rek2]

Thanks for your response.. Im still a bit confused but not as much. I think groups is an important social feature.. lot of my friends

are activists and programmers and the funtion of groups to have a place for inside talk is very important at the time of organizing.. I do not thing diaspora is ready to be able to do reach-out like facebook but it does and potencially has all the attributes(but groups) for activists to be able to be safe/secure/private when they talk between eachother..

I am willing to start developing or integrate groups from other forks on the diaspora main tree, I just want to know that if I actually put the work on it, it will at least get considered..

Thanks

[Sarah Mei]

The groups in its current implementation on Pistos' fork feels a little bolted on - meaning it doesn't feel integrated with the rest of the site. We'd need to rethink the interactions before reimplementing. 

Maybe the easiest way to go about it would be to come to one of our code chats in IRC, and discuss with us what you'd like to do.