Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2004 10:51:24 -0500 (EST) From: Daniel Eischen <eischen@vigrid.com> To: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Where is FreeBSD going? Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.10.10401071029390.6213-100000@pcnet5.pcnet.com> In-Reply-To: <20040107145744.GA74418@ussenterprise.ufp.org>
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On Wed, 7 Jan 2004, Leo Bicknell wrote: > > From a practical point of view that has been rapidly breaking down > over the last 6-12 months. People need features in 5.x. Various > people have decided (for good reason, I'm not questioning the > decisions) that a large number of features go into 5.x, and because > of the difficulty in back porting don't go into 4.x. Indeed, the > only reason I'm running -current now is I need support for an Atheros > wireless card. > > The take away I see is that this was too big of a chunk. The next > bite planned needs to be smaller. You can't delay one year or two > years in a production environment. New hardware needs drivers in > that time. New protocols become production deployed in that time. > I am also a firm believer that having all the developers focused so > much on meeting deadlines for all this new complexity leaves them > out of time to deal with the PR's that have been piling up. My perspective as a developer is that there were a lot of things in FreeBSD that needed an overhaul. SMP for example. Sure, it's not perfect and probably still has a ways to go, but this touched a lot of things. I fully expected FreeBSD-5 to get worse before it got better, perhaps lose some folks to Linux because they couldn't wait for stable -5 features. Could it have been better managed? Sure, in a better world where we had more of our developers getting paid to do this (we're lucky that we still have a handful or two of them). > For FreeBSD to appeal to the masses it must install on the latest > and greatest Dell or Gateway or whatever, which means it must include > drivers for today's cheaper-by-the-gross parts from China. Driver > updates in particular need to be very regular, and in the active > -STABLE release, which for now means back-ported to 4.x, even if > that means a complete rewrite because of how different the kernels > are. Otherwise people get forced to run 5.x for a few driver issues, > and then complain like crazy about all the other stuff that's not > ready for prime time. > > Mom said it best, small bites, chew with your mouth closed. I understand this position, but I think this step was a necessary one for the future of the project. My $.02.
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