Date: Sun, 10 Aug 1997 17:01:36 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Wolfgang Helbig <helbig@MX.BA-Stuttgart.De> Cc: brandon@roguetrader.com (Brandon Gillespie), freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: why bother submitting anything (via send-pr) Message-ID: <2423.871257696@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 10 Aug 1997 20:52:19 %2B0200." <199708101852.UAA27642@helbig.informatik.ba-stuttgart.de>
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> The PRs seem to be orphaned since Mike Pritchard left the FreeBSD > project in May 1997. We submitters who are not committers have a > *very* hard time getting any feedback. > > Six of my submissions are left open. Some of them are already fixed or > analyzed and should be closed, some are only fixing typos or adding > a line to man pages and are not worth the trouble you have to > go into in order to get your submission noticed. Again, I'm _very sorry_ you're having this experience and all I can say is that this is due to overload, not any deliberate desire to ignore PRs. Far from it - I'd sleep better at night if I had someone looking after the PRs full-time but wishing alone does not, unfortunately, make it so. > They do! Last week I've got more responses (three) from NetBSD users > than from the FreeBSD project (zero). They probably have far fewer PRs overall to respond to. ;-) > Jordan mentioned that he's going to hire developers for porting > the OS to another architecture. (He left open which architecture.) FreeBSD/ALPHA > I conclude from this, the desertion of the PRs and the discussion > about current ports versus stable ports that the FreeBSD project > is switching to a commercial company that does not depend on > volunteers any more in the long run. This is a thoroughly incorrect conclusion, I'm afraid. What the FreeBSD project is current trying to do is cope realistically with the side-effects of its success, such side-effects being a burgeoning PR database, more tech support questions flowing in than most of our volunteers can handle and a greately increased need for an effective quality assurance program. To put it another way, there are a growing number of tasks which volunteers refuse to handle simply because they are not fun at all and rather too much like a Real Job(tm) for them to want to do it for free. It is THESE people that I'd like to pay, along with the serious developers needed to make progress on a number of stalled issues (like the new installation tools), in order that FreeBSD might continue to deliver on its promise. I think you vastly underestimate the size of the growing gap between what volunteers are willing to do and the number of un-done tasks we have piling up, waiting for a mysterious "someone" to do them. Jordan
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