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Upstream (software development)

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In software development, upstream refers to a direction toward the original authors or maintainers of software that is distributed as source code, and is a qualification of either a bug or a patch. A patch sent upstream, i.e. offered to the original authors or maintainers of the software the patch applies to, would be targeted at being included in (a future release of) the original software instead of being maintained by a distribution's maintainer of said software. This would allow other distributions to benefit from it when they pick up the future release. The term also pertains to bugs – responsibility for a bug is said to lie upstream when it is not caused through the distribution's porting and integration efforts.

See also