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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!news.ececs.uc.edu!newsfeeds.sol.net!worldnet.att.net!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!su-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!su-news-feed4.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!coop.net!pacifier!deraadt From: deraadt@theos.com (Theo de Raadt) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.openbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: *BSD Unification? Date: 06 Apr 1997 19:12:59 GMT Organization: Theo Ports Kernels For Fun And Profit Lines: 48 Message-ID: <DERAADT.97Apr6131259@zeus.pacifier.com> References: <860029226.1885@dejanews.com> <5i8lac$9r2@cynic.portal.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: zeus.theos.com In-reply-to: cjs@cynic.portal.ca's message of 6 Apr 1997 10:08:28 -0700 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38586 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:5762 comp.unix.bsd.openbsd.misc:55 comp.unix.bsd.misc:2947 comp.unix.bsd.386bsd.misc:1220 In article <5i8lac$9r2@cynic.portal.ca> cjs@cynic.portal.ca (Curt Sampson) writes: Now all that aside, I'd also like to point out, in I hope a non-inflamatory way, that asking the current developers to champion merge projects is probably not going to get anywhere. It's not as if the *BSD developers are all sitting around saying to themselves `What shall I do? I've nothing to work on.' If someone wanted to actually start doing the legwork to see what could be merged, ran around talking to the folks in the various camps, arranged for a common CVS repository, and actually started merging code, we'd see some progress. But I've seen very few people with a real interest in doing this. Most of the really pro-merge crowd seem content to post to the newsgroups every once in a while asking why we shouldn't merge. Please don't take that as a flame, but as a guide to what you can do to help merge things. While doing the security scan in OpenBSD, we merged most of the userland changes from FreeBSD into OpenBSD. Since OpenBSD is based on NetBSD and we make a continual good effort to keep merging in any good NetBSD changes at the same time, I like to think that we've got a best of all worlds thing happening. (Please withhold commenting on this opinion of mine until you've had a look at the OpenBSD source tree. ) Merging in the FreeBSD diffs wasn't very hard; we were hand-checking every program in our source tree already so it was easy to see what work FreeBSD had done. We expected that they might have fixed some security holes -- and there were a few places where they had. But it was also nifty because a whole bunch of other cool changes came in as well. They had made some really good userland changes. It took about 4 months to check our entire source tree for security holes, fix whatever we found along the way, and merge the best of the FreeBSD changes too. From where I sit, it was definately worthwhile. So we have continued to look at FreeBSD, and consider all of their daily changes as being relevant to our system. I scan their PR database at least once a day. We've got a lot of the same bugs, afterall. BTW, the two major things that were not merged in was the locale stuff and libc threads. Those are much harder problems involving very extensive code changes, thus we skipped them for the time being. -- This space not left unintentionally unblank. deraadt@theos.com www.OpenBSD.org -- We're fixing security problems so you can sleep at night.