bitrot [was: Deprecating / Removing floppy drive support]

[Mark Linimon]

On Sun, Dec 03, 2017 at 08:55:18AM -0800, Rodney W. Grimes wrote:
> my observation is that FreeBSD is a lot of new toys that work fairly
> well and a collection of rotting bits that get the axe every few
> years.

Having spent 10+ years triaging PRs I can tell you for certain that
there are large parts of the src tree* that no one works on.  (For
instance, if we use "bin" as a rough proxy for "userland", there are
1668 userland PRs.)

I had a breakdown of kern PRs into "subsystems" which I kept going for
a few years, but it bitrotted (was GNATS-specific).  It never really
got any uptake, but I found it educational anyways:

  https://people.freebsd.org/~linimon/studies/prs/prs_for_all_groups.html

For instance, it led me to believe that large chunks of "libraries" and
"audio" were not actively maintained.

But beside from features missing from the tools, we have a large, open,
problem with "someone needs to take ownership of the xyz code".

I would be happy to hear constructive ideas.  (Readers should be warned
that based on past experience I no longer believe that "well, someone
should just do that" leads anywhere.)

obdisclaimer: I am not trying to discourage the people who currently
actively work on maintenance by pointing to the overall numbers; in fact,
I appreciate their efforts.  I just want to know how we can clone them.

mcl

* The ports tree does a little better by assigning maintainers.  It
turns out that most, but not all, of the key components have at least
a putative maintainer listed.  It's good but insufficient.