FreeBSD's problems as seen by the BSDForen.de community

[Beech Rintoul]

On Wednesday 09 January 2008, Mark Linimon said:
> I appreciate the fact that you took the time to write this post and
> raise serious issues in a non-confrontational manner.
>
> On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 12:20:13AM +0100, Dominic Fandrey wrote:
> > Even minimal I/O load on a hard disk suffices to lock up whole
> > systems. Posts on the mailinglists current and stable have often
> > been answered with denial or have simply been ignored.
>
> The responses on the mailing lists can indeed vary in quality.  My
> own experience is that many of the key FreeBSD developers respond
> fairly well -- when they've got time to do so.  Some exceptions
> exist.  But I don't think any one person is working on amd64 to the
> exclusion of i386. Perhaps that is what it would take.
>
> Other than trying to identify individuals whose responses are doing
> more harm than good, I don't have any suggestions here.
>
> > What we think might be a solution to the regression problem,
> > would be the establishing of a Regressions Team, similar to other
> > teams like the Security Team.
>
> Unfortunately it requires volunteers to constitute such a thing. 
> I've been trying to come up with ideas on how to get more people
> involved in what we would consider 'maintainence' activities, but
> I've yet to make an impact.  A few people have expressed interest
> in helping to go through the PR backlog, but the big shortage is
> committers who are willing to work with them on such unglamorous
> tasks.  (I am working on a proposal to at least make it less
> frustrating to do so, but I don't want to tie that into this
> thread.)
>
> Having said that, I would join such a team and try to work with it.
>
> > PRs remain unanswered or the reporters are told that the
> > regressions they report do not exist.
>
> We clearly have a disconnect on PRs.  More come in than we have any
> way to handle.  This is clearly most distressing when the PRs
> contain patches and/or test cases.  Again, I'm open to ideas on how
> to set up something where more people can participate.
>
> I've tried to flag certain PRs with '(regression)', fwiw, which is
> necessary but clearly insufficient.

Why don't we have more bugathons? While they might be a hassle to 
coordinate, we seem to get a lot accomplished. I can't speak for 
other committers, but I would be willing to donate time to help with 
the backlog. 

Beech

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Beech Rintoul - FreeBSD Developer - beech at FreeBSD.org
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