FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity, and lifecycle

[Igor Mozolevsky]

On 18 January 2012 01:11, Eitan Adler <lists at eitanadler.com> wrote:

> It takes time to review and test patches. There are a lot of people
> that think "it only takes 30 seconds to download the patch, apply, and
> commit."  This is just not true.

I fully understand that and it is not what I was saying, what I was
saying was about the patches that were being plainly ignored/allowed
to go stale. What you said below is perfectly reasonable once a
committer is actively involved in dealing with a patch, then I, and
anyone else for that matter, would be very reasonably expected to be
involved in the process and understands that someone else is working
on the issue you've address. The problem, however, lies in the time
between a patch is submitted and is "picked up", if the latter ever
occurs!.. That is where the discouragement occurs.

[snip]

> And this assumes the patch was perfect, there really was a bug, and
> everyone thinks things through properly.  The process take anywhere
> from half an hour for obvious fixes to multiple days  in addition to
> the committer's work, school, and family obligations..

I hope I've address what you say here just above :-) and
wholeheartedly agree with everything else you've said, but you are
addressing the problem from a different angle: nobody is ever going to
disagree that _once_ someone has picked up a patch it will take them
time to get it through whatever steps necessary. But, as I said above,
it's getting to *this* stage that is the lengthy and a disheartening
process...

[snip]

> If you have ideas to make this process easier or more efficient we are
> all eager to hear them. I am especially interested to know what *I*
> could do to help speed things along in areas I don't know well enough
> to commit to.

The problem, which I suspect is very difficult to overcome in what I
call the "bazaar" environment, is the enforcement. One way to
"encourage" people to fix their code would be to prevent them from
committing to -CURRENT once they pass a certain threshold of
"unattended" patches. Of course then, committers will be whinging that
they'd be resigning if they can't commit to -CURRENT, but quite
frankly, why should anyone have the commit privilege if they can't be
bothered to address the bugs, are those people just using the FreeBSD
project to boost their CV (with great powers comes great
responsibility!)?


--
Igor M. :-)