Where is FreeBSD going?

Paul Robinson paul at iconoplex.co.uk
Tue Jan 6 15:28:39 PST 2004


Brad Knowles wrote:

>     Define "us".  You sure as hell aren't speaking for me.

Accepted. It came from paul at iconoplex.co.uk and therefore can only 
represent my own opinion. But I know a lot of people who are looking at 
deploying 5- who aren't just pissed off - they're *scared*. I don't 
think many of the developers understand this. To us (yes, I'm not 
speaking for Brad Knowles), FreeBSD is not a project we spend our spare 
time on and love and adore. Well, it is, but it's also a lot more. It 
defines our careers. We roll out something that isn't "quite right", our 
jobs are finished. Right now, if somebody asks me what our roll-out 
strategy is for the next 18 months, I have to respond "don't know", 
whereas the Linux guys are just laughing... don't even start me on what 
the Windows guys are doing to my career right now....

OK, so it has got personal... I accept it is not the FreeBSD development 
team's job to look after my career, and to date I've looked after that 
by myself OK, but all I'm asking is you try and at least understand 
where some people are coming from on this.

If 5.3, when it arrives, is genuinely production ready, trust me, the 
drinks are on me - I will do my absolute best to get to the next BSDcon 
and get everybody drunk on an expense account. If it isn't, well, I'll 
just have to whisper "I told you so" quietly somewhere.

>     If you have a set of skills that you think could be useful, please 
> contact Mark or one of the other members of -core to find out how you 
> might be able to contribute to the project.

Mark has mailed me off-list. His tone isn't great. I probably deserve 
the "Fuck off. Go away." I'l deal with that seperately. :-)

>     I have the greatest respect for Matt, but he has been a serious 
> problem for the project for a long time.  His technical disagreements 
> with other members of the project are just one relatively minor aspect 
> of those problems.  His personality has been a much bigger issue.

OK, I've never run into that. Over on the DragonFly stuff, he seems 
pleasant enough and his ideas are innovative, strong, if sometimes... 
*cough*... eccentric (e.g. replacing sysinstall with an Apache server 
and a load of PHP...), but I'll accept I haven't seen that, and I know 
others have had their problems there. I did see the fall-out on these 
lists with the argument that caused it all to kick off about a year ago 
though, and I don't think others on the project dealt with him (in 
public at least) fairly. Again, just my opinion, I wasn't involved, 
don't know what happened in private.

>     If you want to feel like this is your project, then you need to 
> find a way to take ownership of some part.  See above.


Ooooh, no. That isn't what I want at all. I just want end-users to feel 
they have a voice. That's all. Maybe they do, and I don't see it. Maybe 
they don't *and that's for the good for the project* but in my opinion, 
it just seems odd.

>     Please let us know how it turns out.

Actually, no, I suspect 4.9 will keep me going for at least another 18 
months, by which point hopefully 5- stable will be back where everybody 
wants it.

In fairness, tonight, I was sat at a BSD User Group meeting in front of 
my laptop with a fresh copy of 5- and I (for one reason or another) was 
digging around and found a copy of the 5- roadmap article in 
/usr/share/doc which I hadn't read in a long time. I honestly wish I'd 
read that before posting my last mail to this list. An apology of sorts 
is due, and you may have it. Sorry.

And yes, I was having a bad day, and my tone was rotten to those of you 
who put so much time into FreeBSD, and all I ask in future is that you 
realise that some points about bitrot, bloat, bad performance and a lack 
of *feeling* the end user gets heard is enough to cause real problems 
for a lot of people.

-- 
Paul Robinson




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