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On the other hand, maintaining a custom tool vs a patched fork is not that dissimilar, is it? If patching the prevalent tool makes sense otherwise, I wouldn’t w

• duggan 2y ago
  That's a fair point, particularly in the case of go. Be interested to understand the reasoning myself.
  • dhruvrajvanshi 2y ago
    Trying to understand a big existing codebase might be more difficult than rewriting a small subset for your own use case, especially for something as trivial as a parser for a relatively simple language like protobuf.
    • chipdart 2y ago
      > Trying to understand a big existing codebase might be more difficult than rewriting a small subset for your own use case (...) Adding a small feature to an existing codebase will never require more work than implementing a minimal working example from scratch.
      • marssaxman 2y ago
        Gaining enough understanding of that existing codebase to know how one would go about adding that small feature, on the other hand, can easily require more time than it would take to build what you need from scratch.
• chipdart 2y ago
  > On the other hand, maintaining a custom tool vs a patched fork is not that dissimilar, is it? You're somehow ignoring all the development work you need to invest to go from zero to alternative implementation, not to mention the maintenance work you need to do to come close in stability. The whole point of FLOSS is that everyone, including you, can build upon all the work invested by everyone else. Otherwise there would be a whole lot of people reinventing the wheel.