Date: Sun, 22 Feb 1998 10:31:35 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com> Cc: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: More breakage in -current as a result of header frobbing. Message-ID: <27525.888172295@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 22 Feb 1998 10:52:52 MST." <199802221752.KAA24429@mt.sri.com>
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> > > FreeBSD's problem is that everyone has 'broken' the tree enough times > > > that no-one is willing to brandish the 'big stick' to whack people for > > > making bad commits. If you've got no negative feedback, then you've got > > > no reason to test changes. > > > > More to the point, it's far more damaging to alienate and potentially > > lose an existing volunteer than it is to have the tree occasionally > > broken, as much as I might whine about that from time to time. > > To a point, I agree. But, if that is indeed the case, then why isn't > Terry a committer? He may damage the tree, but we're definitely > alienating him. I was really careful to say *existing* volunteer above for exactly that reason. ;) And Terry isn't a committer for the simple reason that he's not *trusted* by anyone on our 17 member core team, a group which shook off its traditional apathy about such political issues to unanimously reject the proposal that he be added (which was also a first for us). I hate to single Terry out like this, but since you raised him as a specific issue... As to why we voted so unanimously on this, let's just say that Terry is a rather unique individual who can argue passionately and convincingly on either side of an argument, whether he's right or wrong. He's also wrong about 50% of the time, leading to an incredibly high overhead in trying to judge which side of the coin his current (multi-page, voluminously supported) argument falls on. This, in turn, leads to an unwillingness to trust the other 50% and hence resulted in the vote going the way it did. > We can't have it both ways. Either we have an *enforced* policy of > actually punishing offenders (which may offend them and cause them to > run away), or we don't have any policy at all and so claiming to have I'd rather not have a policy based on punishment. We're supposed to be doing this for fun and the joy of making a good OS, and hitting people with sticks is not conducive to that. I really wish Terry's specific predilection for pounding a pulpit didn't require such constant push-back since it definitely leads to the impression that we're going out of our way to hit HIM with a stick, but it's not always possible to avoid this given the extremely wide range of personalities (and personality disorders :-) we have to contend with in a project like this. > We got here by people who put out quality/tested software. This appears > to no longer be as important as it once was to many people, including > many people in core. I think you're reading rather too much into this. I'm willing to concede that there's a problem, but I don't see this as indicative of a general decline in core team quality. These things tend to be more cyclic than anything else and we'd appear to be on the down side of the cycle right now. Hope springs eternal that this will begin climbing upwards again as various folks become suitably chastened about breakage. Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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