Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 19:26:12 -0600 From: Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com> To: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: State of the Union Report (backout request department) Message-ID: <200301311926.12431.linimon@lonesome.com>
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(This is just a view from the sidelines; I generally do ports hacking and not kernel hacking, and thus my views might not carry much weight, but here goes anyways). One of the more interesting features of the FreeBSD development model seems to me to be the ability for people to request controversial CVS commits to be backed out pending further technical discussion. IMHO this seems like a wise (albeit nonintuitive) plan to avoid meta-discussions about what should and should not have been committed by whom and reviewed by whom (and so on and so forth). But recently (especially since the 5.0 release) the backout request mechanism seems to have fallen on hard times. Without too much difficulty, I was able to find 5 separate backout requests in this year's archive of cvs-all alone which were not quickly honored. (I'm not counting an ignored request for which the underlying change was apparently security-related). I'm not sure, but there may have been others, possibly on freebsd-current. The point I'm trying to make by posting this is not to take sides with anyone, assign blame or credit, or anything like that. I personally came up in the old Usenet days, and thus have already gone down that same road so many times that I would hope I've earned a lifetime=20 "Get-Out-Of-Flames-Free" card for that reason alone (never mind various mailing lists and other places controversy loves to incubate ....= ) But if we've got that model, it seems to me we ought to honor it, even if (especially if?) we think the request is frivolous or ill-intentioned. After all, if the backout request itself wasn't controversial, it would probably imply the original change wasn't controversial, and thus who would care to ask to back it out in the first place? I'm just asking folks to think about this so that the whole FreeBSD project can move forward and ideas can rise and fall on their technical merits, because frankly that's where the strength of FreeBSD lies -- in its technical merits. Mark Linimon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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