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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!howland.erols.net!nntp.crl.com!news3.crl.com!nexp.crl.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: PPP Masquerading in FreeBSD Distributions? Date: Sun, 01 Dec 1996 03:14:16 -0800 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 44 Message-ID: <32A16888.2781E494@FreeBSD.org> References: <Pine.BSF.3.91.961127181207.9864B-100000@darkstar> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 3.0-CURRENT i386) To: Charles Mott <cmott@srv.net> Charles Mott wrote: > I have neither the experience nor inclination needed for submitting code > to the FreeBSD Central Committee (or should I say Politburo?). For those > who are interested in doing this, it is simple to merge the code with > versions of ppp later than 2.1.5-RELEASE, which is the source base I > worked from. Then you essentially guarantee that it will never happen and probably shouldn't even raise the issue if you're not willing to follow-up on it. Please, you need to be willing here to understand a concept which many programmers are unwilling/unable to grasp, and that's that software *rots* when left to itself. That means that merely taking on your patches without anyone to "own" them is pretty much as good as saying that it'll be dead and buried inside of 6 months, another legacy wart which someone will only have to expend additional effort later in order to remove. This happened with the original ISDN code, it happened with the device registration code and it looked like it was going to happen with DEVFS except that the original author came back and started working on it again. All were very promising, well-intentioned projects when they first started and in the case of the ISDN code, I even brought in myself, I was that enthusiastic about the prospect of having a working set of ISDN tools to start with. The fact that the code had no real sponsor and a set of authors who subsequently went on to other things in favor of continuing to work with us on it were what led to its subsequent demise and removal, a waste of everyone's time. So please don't hurl around epithets like "politburo" just because we're unwilling to further engage in bad software engineering practices which we've learned to avoid the hard way. If you're willing to support this code in FreeBSD and be responsive to bug reports, I or someone else among the almost *70* other committers (a pretty large committee, I'd say) will be happy to help you integrate it. If all you're interested in doing is the equivalent of a drive-by shooting on the FreeBSD ppp code base, however, then we are most definitely not interested and will wait for someone who's in it for the long-haul to present a similar solution. The solution to the IP proxy problem *is* very much desired. A bandaid-and-run approach is very much not. -- - Jordan Hubbard President, FreeBSD Project