Upcoming Releases Schedule...

[Robert Watson]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008, Jo Rhett wrote:

> On Sep 18, 2008, at 6:32 AM, Wilko Bulte wrote:
>> Indeed, there is no easy solution.  Extending support lifetime takes more
>> resources of course.
>
> And my e-mails have always discussed ways to get more resources.  Recently 
> we even had a group of people trying to arrange for more explicit corporate 
> support for testing and release process.  For some reason unclear to me, not 
> a single developer has stepped up and said "Great.  Here's how we could use 
> you..."  The entire concept of getting *more resources* is the elephant in 
> the room that everyone seems intent to avoid considering.

No, we're just waiting for you to go ahead and do it.

> Maybe, just maybe, there is some reason why FreeBSD doesn't want more people 
> helping.  Or ... something.  I haven't the vaguest clue.  If there is some 
> reason why getting paid people to work on testing and release cycle is a bad 
> idea, would someone please stand up and explain?

No, we'd love it if more people were paid to work on things like this, but 
there are two practical problems: (1) finding people, and (2) paying them. 
All of us are busy people -- we have jobs, we have houses with mortgages, etc, 
and those of us who are already spending a lot of time on FreeBSD are probably 
pretty maxed out without adding more to our plates.  You seem to have a lot of 
energy to burn sending e-mail about how to improve the world, and I think what 
the rest of us would like to see is that energy get turned to the more 
practical part of the problem.

If you are literally standing there with money that you can't figure out how 
to spend, contact the FreeBSD Foundation Board with a specific proposal 
regarding the amount of money and what you're trying to accomplish.  Perhaps 
we can help you identify people who would take the money, companies that might 
want to be involved, help provide some matching funding, etc.  However, it 
needs to be at least a strawman concrete proposal, because waving hands only 
gets you so far.  And it has to be something worth taking time away from all 
the other things busy people get up to in life, such as optimizing network 
stacks, fixing file system bugs, supporting releases, etc, or the endeavour 
has hurt rather than helped.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge