Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2003 11:54:59 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: John-Mark Gurney <gurney_j@efn.org> Cc: Kip Macy <kmacy@fsmware.com> Subject: Re: FreeBSD mail list etiquette Message-ID: <3F9AC703.4DBAA14C@mindspring.com> References: <200310230143.32244.wes@softweyr.com> <20031025175948.GF683@funkthat.com>
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John-Mark Gurney wrote: > Wes Peters wrote this message on Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 01:43 -0700: > > Kip Macy, other DragonFlyBSD developers, and anyone else wishing to > > contribute are invited to join and participate in the open FreeBSD mail > > lists, sharing code, design information, research and test results, etc. > > according to their own will. We welcome input from everyone, including > > constructive criticism of weaknesses or flaws in FreeBSD. > > And patches (against FreeBSD) are highly encouraged. It rarely helps > to simply point out flaws (or showing how X OS runs soo much better than > FreeBSD, why are you guys even running FreeBSD?) w/o showing code to fix it. > > Note: I am not speaking as an offical representive of FreeBSD, just as > a developer who has too few time to try to code up a patch for code I > haven't seen. And considering that DragonFlyBSD is based upon FreeBSD > coming up with said patches should be trivial. First off, I really appreciate the mmap() discussion which has taken place. Someone has done a lot of work to create benchmarks, which, while being microbenchmarks, are a hell of a lot more useful than most of their kind. Further, they've pointed out where to get code to get comparable results in FreeBSD, licensed under a two clause BSD license, which means the only issue facing anyone is one of trivial integration. Second, Kip Macy and Matt Dillon have done some excellent work on the checkpointing code. It's basically ELF-based, and requires only small changes to the exec to set up the process for being able to be checkpointed and restarted. Again, the license is a two clause BSD license, and again, the only work necessary to get this over to FreeBSD is integration. When someone offers you a gift, you don't jump down their throat with jack-boots on, complaining about how the gift is wrapped or what color it is; you shut the hell up about any complaints and say "Thank you". If the wrapping bothers you, well, you're going to remove it anyway. If the color bothers you, wait until they leave and paint the damn thing. If they come for a visit, they will be much more likely to be happy that you put it on display on the mantle than unhappy that you changed its color. Frankly, FreeBSD has too many cooks, and not enough bottle washers; this is a euphimism for saying that all anyone with a commit bit seems to want to do any more is write new code, and no one is willing to take on the integration and maintenance tasks. In Linux, this work is done by Linus, Alan Cox, and a couple of other people. People get commit bits so that they can do integration, and so that patches don't sit in bug databases for 6 years unintegrated. The problem with this imbalance, is that you seem to be unwilling to hire bottle washers, and people willing to wash bottles when there are no clean bottles left are never given any respect, and certainly not the level of respect accorded to cooks. You guys need to get your heads out, and give out some commit bits to some people willing to do the dirty work of integration of the code people are donating, and of closing out bug database entries where code is provided, and writing code that demonstrates the bug database problem and coming up with a fix and integrating *that*, where patches aren't provided. -- Terry
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