svn commit: r335402 - head/sbin/veriexecctl

[Rodney W. Grimes]

...

> > Hi,
> > 
> > While the code is out of HEAD, it can be posted to a github branch
> > (or
> > a projects/ branch if you prefer SVN) for people to try.
> > 
> > Best regards,
> > Conrad
> > 
> 
> Yeah, put it on a branch where it'll get ignored for another two years.
> 
> If this code had been committed long ago, as it probably should have
> been, then people would have been playing with it, and by time I needed
> it a few months ago there would have been all kinds of useful info in
> mailing lists and blogs about how to set it up and what was good and
> bad about it and so on. ?Iterative refinement would have been underway.
> 
> Instead what I found was a bunch of patches and a big steep learning
> curve with no existing information about using it in the real world.
> With that info available, I/we ($work) would have been in a position to
> quickly adopt it and begin contributing to the ongoing refinement.
> Instead I had to conclude that product deadlines just didn't allow us
> to even try to get it working from a standing start as first-adopters,
> so we had to move in a different direction. Even though this is a
> better solution than what we did, business practicalities will likely
> prevent us from circling back and changing everything over to this
> scheme in the future, so now we'll end up never contributing much to
> this work.
> 
> So, IMO, all this calling for things to be reverted isn't just
> inappropriate, it's actively harmful. This is -current where
> development happens and imperfection is expected. Hiding work in
> patchsets and reviews and alternate branches and other shadowy places
> because it's not perfect is just a way of ensuring it never gets any
> better.

I am with Ian on this one, we have far too much code sitting
out of tree and rotting faster than anyone can maintain said
code out of tree, meaning we are litterly cutting our own
developement efforts off, not at just the foot but up closer
to the hip.

The veriexec code landed, its in tree, fix it, polish it,
cut out the ugly bits, but for sake of sanity do not whole
sale revert it so it can generally rot some more.

Officially this code is on the 12.0 target path, it needs
to be in the tree sooner where many eyes can work on it.
-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org