Policy for removing working code

[Vadim Goncharov]

Hi jhell! 

On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 12:51:06 -0400; jhell wrote about 'Re: Policy for removing working code (Was: HEADS UP: FreeBSD 6.4 and 8.0 EoLs coming soon)':

>>> The situation was: an announcement was made that "in X months, all network
>>> drivers need to be made to run Giant-free so that FreeBSD can drop Giant
>>> from the neworking stack to move forward."  Within that period, most of
>>> the drivers were updated.  Repeated postings were made to the mailing list
>>> that "the following drivers still have not been converted, and need to be
>>> updated or they will be dropped."  They weren't; they were droppped.
>> 
>> No. See my answer to vwe@ that there were no proper announcements. With them,
>> for example, someone could get sponsored to update these drivers which were
>> needed by those FreeBSD users who can't maintain code themselves. That's a last
>> resort, more likely volunteers will come, but you get the idea.
>> 
>>> So while it could "still" work, it was slowing down progress.
>> 
>> If it is not ideology, then what is it?..
>> 
>>> The fact of the matter is, FreeBSD is a big project with a finite number
>>> of developers.  We try to keep as much coverage of systems as we can, but
>>> a reality of any large software engineering project is that older features
>>> sometimes have to be dropped to make progress.
>> 
>>>From time to time such critical cases could possibly be handled by another
>> ways, I've mentioned one possible above.
>> 
>>> The code still exists in the repository for any interested party to pick
>>> up and modernize.
>> 
>> I hope that for this particular case alternative from ports will be enough.
>> But policy is not tied to one particular case, alas.
>> 
> Would you please stop provoking a situation for which you are no more
> involved in other than running FreeBSD.

You either not understanding that this situation is about entire project (not
ISDN, but policy) or assert that users just running FreeBSD should not care
about the way things happen, which is wrong. And thus your "stop provoking"
sounds like ostrich policy, which is even worse.

> PS: The website in your signature is broke. This should give you enough
> to do for a while.

You may have noted in whois that I am not that site admin.

-- 
WBR, Vadim Goncharov. ICQ#166852181       mailto:vadim_nuclight at mail.ru
[Moderator of RU.ANTI-ECOLOGY][FreeBSD][http://antigreen.org][LJ:/nuclight]