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Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 09:32:51 -0700
From: David Schultz <das@FreeBSD.ORG>
To: Wilko Bulte <wkb@freebie.xs4all.nl>
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cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
cc: Daniel Ellard <ellard@eecs.harvard.edu>
Subject: Re: Article on Sun's DTrace
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On Thu, Jul 08, 2004, Wilko Bulte wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 01:23:04AM -0700, Avleen Vig wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 08, 2004 at 03:46:24AM -0400, Daniel Ellard wrote:
> > > I don't doubt that DTrace took a long time to do.  However, in most
> > > projects the design phase consumes a lot of time, and it is often the
> > > case that unforeseen problems or changes in the feature set cost the
> > > developers a lot of time.  So while it might have taken six years to
> > > write DTrace the first time, I suspect it would take a fraction of
> > > that time to re-implement.  (It certainly might be longer than "a few
> > > months" and I'm not going to quibble.  We won't know the precise
> > > number until someone does the port.)
> > 
> > They said "6 staff-years". This means if they have 6 people working on
> > it full time, it took 1 year to complete. If they had 60 people full
> > time, it took just over 5 weeks (technically, i doubt that would work
> > practically).
> 
> It works about as well as having 3 women deliver a baby in 3 months.

;-)  See also Fred Brooks' book _The_Mythical_Man-Month_.

But if you *do* happen to know 60 good programmers who are willing
to work on FreeBSD full time for very little money, let me know
and I'll see what I can do about that baby thing.