Date: Wed, 11 Feb 1998 03:15:15 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: dg@root.com Cc: jb@cimlogic.com.au, tlambert@primenet.com, jkh@time.cdrom.com, jbryant@unix.tfs.net, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: merging win95 and nt filesystem changes into msdosfs Message-ID: <199802110315.UAA00548@usr04.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199802102132.NAA09318@implode.root.com> from "David Greenman" at Feb 10, 98 01:32:38 pm
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> In many cases, Terry's solutions to the problems that he is trying to > solve aren't the ones we want to adopt. The standard reasoning against this was: 1) Don't want divergence from NetBSD 2) Don't want divergence from 4.4-Lite because of 4.4-Lite2 3) Don't want to integrate 4.4-Lite2 yet (code languished 1.5 years after Lite2 release before FreeBSD integration) 4) Existing committers must understand everything that non-committers want committed. > There are far more instances where Kirk McKusick and other people > in-the-know have objected to the direction that Terry wants to take > us than there are in favor. I've talked to Kirk about many of the changes since I've been in the Bay Area, and you are misquoting him here. He has agreed that a number of the layering issues I have been harping on since day one are, in fact, legitimate problems. I've also talked to John Heidemann, who architected the FS stacking code in the first place, and he agrees that there are problems with the 4.4 integration of his source code, which he donated from the Ficus project. > Terry's unwillingness to carefully explain/justify the changes that > he proposes in a manor that reasonable kernel developers can > understand has further resulted in a serious lack of trust. For > these reasons it's the unanimous opinion of the core team that > Terry not be given commit privileges. Not to mention that I've never asked for them, and when I was initially offered them badk in 1994, I declined on the basis that, as a USL employee at the time, I would potentially be a legal liability to the project that USL could use to claim contamination by way of FreeBSD use of USL intellectual property. I'll be happy to explain anything you have questions about. As far as justification goes, well, "reasonable kernel hackers" aren't terribly interested in FS code, except when someone else goes to do something to it, then they get incredibly interested. Otherwise there would be more "resonable kernel hackers" actually writing FS code. It's also a bit hard to justify "commit this so I can better do research on what I think should be done next so I can answer your questions about 'what should be done next?'". 8-). It's strange that commits that seem to be diddles to other people are not allowed: if they have no effect they can perceive, then they certainly have no harm, either. Harm requires effect to occur. The only rationale against these has been "we fear change, specifically in the form of divergence". Now that that's blown out, so long as it's possible to revert such changes if they are seen to have a detrimental effect, I don't see why there's a problem. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe current" in the body of the message
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