The beastie boot menu.

[Kris Kennaway]

On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 04:24:03PM -0800, Chris Pressey wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004 15:02:14 -0800
> Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 02:51:30PM -0800, Chris Pressey wrote:
> > 
> > > > [...]
> > > > 	I'm sorry, I just don't see the source of confusion.  I don't
> > > > see the floundering.
> > > 
> > > Do you follow cvs-src@?
> > 
> > Come now, surely you can do a better recruiting job for DragonFly than
> > falling back on FUD.
> > 
> > Kris
> 
> I'm not recruiting for DragonFly; I raised these exact same issues about
> lack of a stated philosophy on their list a couple of months ago.
> 
> I'm also not spreading FUD.  I'm not sure of the best way to objectively
> measure the amount of floundering a project is undergoing, but I think
> counting the number of backouts and backout requests would be a good
> first approximation.  In order to measure that, one would quite
> naturally have to read the CVS logs.
> 
> And while I have not conducted a formal study, I've seen backouts and
> backout requests appear far more frequently on the FreeBSD CVS list than
> on any of the other BSD CVS lists I've followed.
> 
> You may have noticed, in fact, that this entire thread was started off
> by one such backout.
> 
> Now you might say, well FreeBSD only has more backouts because FreeBSD
> has so many more developers and so much more activity.  That's almost
> certainly true.  But that's even *more* of a reason to have a cohesive
> philosophy communicated clearly to the entire project, otherwise the
> amount of toe-stepping will become unmanageable.

Even if there were anything to this hypothesis, your metric only
measures conflict between developers and lack of ability of certain
people to obtain public consensus on their changes, not lack of
direction for the project (in many such cases there's agreement on the
intended goal of the change, but not the implementation).

Certainly, a project with a small number of major developers will have
less backout requests by virtue of no-one standing up to disagree with
them, but that doesn't mean it's going anywhere very quickly.

Kris

P.S. Given the histories involved, it's amusing to see a dragonfly
advocate pointing out that minimizing inter-developer conflict within
the project would be a good way for FreeBSD to achieve a better
project direction.
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