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#! rnews 3356 bsd Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.telstra.net!news-out.internetmci.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!howland.erols.net!feed1.news.erols.com!super.zippo.com!zdc!szdc!news From: "John S. Dyson" <dyson@freebsd.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community" Date: Tue, 01 Apr 1997 22:35:45 -0500 Organization: John S. Dyson's home machine Lines: 50 Message-ID: <3341D411.41C67EA6@freebsd.org> References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <333F45A6.41C67EA6@FreeBSD.org> <5hplcv$6lf@fido.asd.sgi.com> <3340C3F0.41C67EA6@FreeBSD.org> <5hrqmo$44f@fido.asd.sgi.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) Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38345 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6565 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29638 Steve Alexander wrote: > > In article <3340C3F0.41C67EA6@FreeBSD.org>, > Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@FreeBSD.org> wrote: > >Assembling a team of individuals > >with just the right combination of significant commercial experience and > >youthful vigor over these last 3+ years has been no easy task, and now > >that we've taken our lumps and learned many of our lessons the hard way > >it's hardly the time to say "well, we certainly did a fine job with this > >team and it seems to be working out nicely. OK, time for us all to quit > >and do something else. :-)" > > Maybe. It depends on your goals. If your goal is to hack the kernel and learn > some stuff, then no problem, keep going. > > If your goal is to create a single viable UNIX, then it might make sense to let > BSD wither and put more support behind Linux, since having several different > free UNIX versions is not the road to long-term success, IMO. > Well, as a project leader of some very large and complex projects in the past, I have found that organization is very important to maintain coherence. Of course, one can ignore infrastructure and build a house of cards and let things come falling in on themselves when the structure is found to be non-existant. FreeBSD has some structure, and even more than some commercial projects that I have seen. Maybe your experience has been in less than ideal situations? I have found that project structure, organization, semi-formal source code control to be useful... Of course, I have found that some people don't think that those very useful tools are important, but the problems eventually catch up with them. Sometimes on projects where I am not serious, or am just playing, I don't bother with source code control. Big projects with multiple developers does require organization. It is really rewarding to see more and more people using FreeBSD and the growth is starting to spurt. Commercial use is becoming overwhelming :-). Of course, the growth in commercial use of the various BSDs doesn't validate our professional techniques and committed attitude. And remember, FreeBSD is an OS. You know which release has what libraries... The times that I have run into the "mix and match" problems on FreeBSD is when I have run Linux kernel oriented binaries. I can usually find the right shared libs somewhere on some Linux site after trolling around for a while. John