FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Ian Lepore]

On Wed, 2012-01-18 at 01:17 +0200, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> on 17/01/2012 23:46 Ian Lepore said the following:
> > Now, before we're even really completely up and running on 8.2 at work,
> > 9.0 hits the street, and developers have moved on to working in the 10.0
> > world.  What are the chances that any of the patches I've submitted for
> > bugs we fixed in 8.x are ever going to get commited now that 8 is well
> > on its way to becoming ancient history in developers' minds?
> 
> My opinion is that this will have more to do with your approach to pushing the
> patches (and your persistence) rather than with anything else.  As long as
> stable/8 is still a supported branch or the bugs are reproducible in any of the
> supported branches.

Well I submitted a sort of random sample of the patches we're
maintaining at work, 11 of them as formal PRs and 2 posted to the lists
here recently.  So far two have been committed (the most important one
and the most trivial one, oddly enough).  I'm not sure just how pushy
one is supposed to be, I don't want to be a jerk.  Not to mention that I
wouldn't know who to push.  That's actually why I'm now being active on
the mailing lists, I figured maybe patches will be more accepted from
someone the commiters know rather than just as code out of the blue
attached to a PR.

I think it would be great if there were some developers (a team, maybe
something not quite that formal) who concentrated on maintenance of
older code for the user base who needs it.  I'd be happy to contribute
to that effort, both on my own time, and I have a commitment from
management at work to allow me a certain amount of billable work hours
to interface with the FreeBSD community, especially in terms of getting
our work contributed back to the project (both to help the project, and
to help us upgrade more easily in the future).

I have no idea if there are enough developers who'd be interested in
such a concept to make it work, co-op or otherwise.  But I like the fact
that users and developers are talking about their various needs and
concerns without any degeneration into flame wars.  It's cool that most
of the focus here is centered on how to make things better for everyone.

-- Ian