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Date:      Sun, 02 Apr 2000 22:41:11 +0200
From:      Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
To:        Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
Cc:        Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>, "Justin T. Gibbs" <gibbs@FreeBSD.ORG>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/sys/kern kern_mib.c vfs_bio.c src/sys/sys buf.h 
Message-ID:  <15778.954708071@critter.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 02 Apr 2000 12:28:37 PDT." <200004021928.MAA50168@apollo.backplane.com> 

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In message <200004021928.MAA50168@apollo.backplane.com>, Matthew Dillon writes:

>:I'm not rabid about you getting your stuff reviewed, I'm rabid
>:about you not committing in a frenzy where you forget to do even
>:very basic testing.
>
>    Excuse me?  Not do Basic testing?  
>
>    Poul, I have $13,000 worth of machines that I use *ONLY* for testing.  

Matt, I didn't really want to disuss this subject with you, because
traditionally our ability to discuss this subject in email hasn't
been too great, but because the two of us recently have had some
fruitfull and productive communication, (and I have silently hoped
that this was the beginning of a new era, lets both of us try to
make it that!) I will give it one more try:

You can do me and probably yourself a big favour by not replying
right away.  I'll be in my bed sleeping in a moment so you will
not get an answer any sooner than 10-12 hours from now anyway, so
feel free to take all the time you need to consider and think
before you answer me.  "Let us sleep on it" as we say over here.

Most of the time you display excellent judgement and your commits
are well-tested and analyzed, but every so often we have seen a
cases where you have gotten all exited about something, usually
quite advanced topics, and where you prematurely have committed
something which basically did not work and then in a frenzy of
commits tried to make it work.

That basically gives everybody a heart-attack and a lot of code
to scrutinize, neither of which is high on anyones wish-list.

This is the only behaviour of yours that I have a serious problem
with.

It's not a question of technical compentency, you clearly have
that, it's only a question of controling your eagerness to commit
code when you are in that particular overly-exited mood.

In other words, I usually trust your judgement, but I don't trust
it at all when you are in this "all exited about the stuff you are
doing" mood, and the only practical way to prevent repeats have
been the mandatory reviews.

It is not a question of who has the most hardware and who hasn't,
in fact most recently your $13k worth of hardware wasn't used to
make sure that the GENERIC kernel would compile after your SMP GKL
pushdown commit, so hardware availability doesn't seem to have
anything to do with the issue at all.

I do consider you one of the very few "general-purpose" kernel
hackers we have in addition to myself, and I really wish we can
get you to be a more productive member of the FreeBSD developers
because we face a hell of a stiff competition these days, and having
only two or three general purpose kernel hackers is having several
too few, at least in my mind.

But for us to loosen the grip on you, we need to have some mechanism,
some kind of agreement or arrangement in place which we all trust
to delay your commits when you are in that exicited/frenzied mood.

Ideally I would wish we could simply have you say "OK I wont do
that anymore", but for historical reasons it needs to be a bit
more substantial than that.

I'm very open to suggestions from you as to how we avoid these
frenzied commits in the future and if you can come up with another
idea which is as effective as mandatory reviews in controling it,
I will happily withdraw my standing objection to the lifting of
the current restrictions imposed on you.

Poul-Henning

--
Poul-Henning Kamp             FreeBSD coreteam member
phk@FreeBSD.ORG               "Real hackers run -current on their laptop."
FreeBSD -- It will take a long time before progress goes too far!


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