Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 00:05:09 -0000 From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> To: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG, Mike Smith <msmith@FreeBSD.ORG>, net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Request to back out Luigis polled-net patch in -stable. Message-ID: <30556.1007764517@critter.freebsd.dk> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 07 Dec 2001 16:49:51 EST." <p05101002b836df81d329@[128.113.24.47]>
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In message <p05101002b836df81d329@[128.113.24.47]>, Garance A Drosihn writes: >Poul-Henning included one comment about "track records" which may >have been a bit harsh, but if you ignore that one sentence than >everything he said seemed pretty reasoned (ie, "calmly thought out", >as opposed to "emotional outburst"), and pretty reasonable. I would like to defend that comment, and I apologize for it sounding harsh, it was simply meant as a flat statement of fact on my part. We have committers in the project who gets things right the first time around, every time, on time, on schedule, under budget and with a global reduction of green-house gasses as a side effect. When Bruce Evans commits something one can virtually rest assured that it has been throughly tested ever since he originally wrote it in 1974 and that several satelites and ICBMs wouldn't work and the cold war would not have ended without that patch. Then we have other committers who drag a trail of death and destruction through a sequence of more and more frantic commits until they finally (by accident ?) gets it right enough that the tree isn't broken anymore. (I wont mention names here). These are the two extremes, between them you will find the rest of us. Now, for something to go into -stable, there are certain standards, we have haggled over them from time to time. For a new feature to go into -stable, there has to be very very good reasons not to take the detour around -current. In particular there has to be a very good and convincing argument that something _will_ go into -current, so that we don't introduce a feature in -stable which the next major release will simply not have: We don't need to disappoint our users any more than we need to with our major releases. Luigi has a track record of delivering some very smart code to FreeBSD, I'm a big fan of his IPFW and DUMMYNET stuff, and I far prefer them to IPFILTER. I even think Luigi is a great guy, and I'm happy to see him being a "Professor of FreeBSD Networking" (well, not quite but...) at his University in Italy. But that doesn't change the fact that Luigis code has never been a "working first time thing wihtout a hitch" for us. There has always been some issues to work out, some things to move around a bit, things which need a bit of generalization and so on. In other words: Luigi is a perfectly normal FreeBSD committer. And that means that he should follow the rules we have for -stable: he doesn't clear the bar to cold commit a new feature into -stable. In particular it should not when it is not convincingly argued that we will be able to integrate the new features in -current any time soon. That's all. I'm not against his code, I just don't want it to go straight into -stable. If the argument holds that -stable and -current has diverged too much for it being feasible to go the usual "into -current, then MFC" walk, then we need to reexamine the entire "-current/-stable" setup and maybe add a 4-CURRENT development-branch from which things get merged to 4-STABLE. (Having worked in multi-branch environments like that, I would be strongly against any such thing and I think anyone who has tried to navigate the cisco IOS version maelström in recent years are likely to be against as well). So in summary my position is: Luigi stuff should be backed out of -stable. Luigi should figure out how to do this right in SMPng/-current and implement it there. Then when we have some experience with it, we can decide on a rational basis if it should be MFC'ed, (or committed cold into -stable if the MFC doesn't make sense). And of course Luigi is more than welcome to distribute his change as a patch against -stable, just like Jun-Itoh does with his ALTQ. (I don't know if Peter has -stable in P4, but that could be one way to make it easier for Luigi to maintain the patch if he had a branch there) -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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