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From: j@bonnie.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD's strengths
Date: 24 Aug 1995 11:23:35 +0200
Organization: Private U**x site, Dresden.
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:18432 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:5097
Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@cloud9.net> wrote:
>For perspective, the NetBSD core team size hovers around 5 people most of
>the time. And they _do_ have to approve all changes to machine-independent
>kernel code.
I guessed that, but since i didn't knew it exactly, i didn't state it.
>... NetBSD and CSRG BSD are the other end, with
>careful design and a small group of core developers enforcing a style and
>single set of standards on the entire work. FreeBSD is somewhere in the
>middle, it seems.
As i wrote: it proved to be impractible for FreeBSD.
``enforcing a style and single set of standards on the entire work'',
hmm. `style' is mostly associated with `cosmetics' in my opinion.
It's not that i wouldn't like some common styling, but seriously, it's
not _that_ important to have all the indentation styles uniform across
the entire tree, as long as the software itself is correct. (It's
better than having a buggy source tree with unified styling. :)
The major question is: you'll have to learn to trust somebody else
doing The Right Thing, instead of believing all others around belong
only to the Great Unwashed Masses. The FreeBSD way shows that it's
possible to create a building on such a mutual trust. People commit
in areas that belong to their field of knowledge, and let it up to
others to commit other things. It's not strictly enforced, and Julian
Howard Stacey (to pick a random example) would certainly avoid hacking
anywhere in the regular tree, while he's doing a valuable job in
maintaining a reasonable number of ports. This policy is not enforced
by adminstrative means, but it used to work.
I know of at least one example where the NetBSD way yielded severely
out-of-date kernel code (which is heavily broken). Hellmuth Michaelis
just complained at the phone that the pcvt code as it is in NetBSD-
current is totally defunct... (while the current official pcvt release
is working). [I know that FreeBSD's pcvt is also one of the latest
pre-3.30 betas, and i didn't have the time yet to upgrade it. Anyway,
it's consistent with the remaining source, and *it's working*.]
--
cheers, J"org private: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
http://www.sax.de/~joerg/
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)