Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 10:31:45 -0700 From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@freebsd.org> To: paul@freebsd-services.com Cc: will@physics.purdue.edu, imp@freebsd.org, cvs-committers@freebsd.org, cvs-all@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/sys/pccard pccard.c pcic.c pcic_pci.c pcicvar.h Message-ID: <20010913103145E.jkh@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <57650000.1000393838@lobster.originative.co.uk> References: <1121080000.1000369966@lobster.originative.co.uk> <20010913073210.X30764@curie.physics.purdue.edu> <57650000.1000393838@lobster.originative.co.uk>
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Well, that's a pretty strong blanket indictment, and rather than try to argue your individual points I'll simply ask what you're doing to "lead by example" in getting FreeBSD back on the right track? By leadership, I also don't mean the posting of impassioned diatribes about how we need to increase quality here or there or anything on the "project management" side since, as others have already pointed out, demanding that volunteers essentially follow your orders is not how things get done most effectively around here. Things get most effectively done around here by having people DO things and, through their demonstrated committment and work methodology, serve as an example to others and drive the right behavior. I posted a project list to -announce recently which covered a number of things which need doing. Tangible, concrete things which would clearly benefit FreeBSD's perception and give the general impression to the outside world that we're not just sitting on our hands or spending all our energy embroiled in internal warfare about style(9) or the formatting of commit messages. Those are "meta-issues" and, while they're important in their own way, an excess of attention paid to them while other very serious projects "rot" for lack of programmer eyeballs also demonstrates a very clear sign to more than just the UK that this project has lost its focus. I don't get tons of email about what's in our commit logs or whether programmers are using the right amount of whitespace, I get tons of email asking "When the heck is SMPng going to be finished?" I get tons of mail asking "When the heck is FreeBSD going to adopt UNICODE or otherwise get its I18N act together?" I get mail asking about our plans for threading and STL and adopting gcc 3.0 and a host of other technical wish-list items. Most people simply want to know when the FEATURES we've committed to are going to be finished, and when I see someone burning a lot of his and other people's time arguing about something completely off the top ten list of burning issues, I see someone who's priorities are strangely inverted and who perhaps claims to be operating in FreeBSD's best interests but, strangely, puts no energy into addressing the areas of *greatest* need. I know that you have some ability to write code, Paul, and that you're more than familiar with the most critically under-resourced projects currently in our CVS repository. If you're that concerned about FreeBSD, why not demonstrate that to us unequivocally by getting involved with something that sorely needs the attention and will deliver maximum bang-for-buck on completion? - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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