From owner-freebsd-advocacy Thu Jul 1 12: 2:57 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from smtp04.primenet.com (smtp04.primenet.com [206.165.6.134]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7B46A15203 for ; Thu, 1 Jul 1999 12:02:49 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tlambert@usr06.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp04.primenet.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id MAA02101; Thu, 1 Jul 1999 12:02:47 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr06.primenet.com(206.165.6.206) via SMTP by smtp04.primenet.com, id smtpd001220; Thu Jul 1 12:02:40 1999 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr06.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id MAA09564; Thu, 1 Jul 1999 12:00:33 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199907011900.MAA09564@usr06.primenet.com> Subject: Re: [Re: [Re: [Re: [FreeBSD Man Pages]]]] To: jesus.monroy@usa.net (Jesus Monroy) Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 19:00:33 +0000 (GMT) Cc: dwilde1@thuntek.net, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <19990701085309.4697.qmail@nw176.netaddress.usa.net> from "Jesus Monroy" at Jul 1, 99 01:53:09 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > I don't consider what you called a patch worthy of the name. > > I have not written a patch to date. > The early PatchKit should have been called > "The Greate Pumpking Packet Kit", but it missed it's calling. :-( > > As for the current patch system it seems to be faring > no better. Not to tempt you out of your self imposed seven day email celebacy, but... The original patchkit was done the way it was done because Bill Jolitz did not expose a source repository of any kind. I realize that the strictures of the patchkit were onerous, but they derived from a human being (me) being the equivalent of a CVS merge. The ordering dependencies only triggered on overlapping patches, but when they triggered, there was a single order-of-application mutex that triggered (gated through a human -- again, me) to ensure that the patches did not fail to apply. Yes, I take full responsibility for the emergent properties of this system, starting with the fact that the serialization was such a bottleneck that people became uncomforatable enough with the choke-hold that they started a completely new repository using a real source management system. And Voi'la, we have NetBSD, the first 386BSD schism. Similarly, I believe the current CVS system, with the inability to run simultaneous views on the repository (what Linus Torvalds and Larry McVoy call "LOD"'s or "Lines Of Developement"), has similar emergent properties. You can make fun of the patchkit, as Lynne Jolitz (who I respect, and whose obvious territoriality at the time is excusable under the circumsatnces of the time) did, and in a similar vein ("one third of the patches are good; one third of them are ineffective but harmless; one third of them are wrong" -- with the implied "I won't tell you which third is which"). However, without my effort, and the subsequent efforts of the people I foisted the job off onto (Nate Williams, Rod Grimes, Jordan, et al.), the world would be a much poorer place. Yes, it's obvious that there are problems that result from emergent properties of the current system. Those of us with sufficiently advanced mathematical tools, an understanding of games and complexity theory, and non-linear dynamics even have mathematical models that are predictive of the systems overall behaviour. It is one thing to call attention to the problem occasionally, to ensure that it is not forgotton; it is another entirely to pour salt in the wound. The problem before us is not to salt wounds, but to design a system such that it has the resulting emergent properties which we designate as desirable. This task is non-trivial in the extreme, to put it mildly. Unless you have concrete proposals, I believe that you have exceeded the threshold of "occasionally" for this particular thread. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. > > > This is getting really disgusting, and you're wasting a lot of > > bandwidth with your obtuseness. > > > I'm obtuse? I reporting facts. You don't like them? > > > SHUT UP if you've got nothing valid to add. > > > I've always SpeakUP when I have valid things to add. > > > --- > "I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, > pop-up-happy dungeon like NT." > http://www.performancecomputing.com/features/9809of1.shtml > > > > ____________________________________________________________________ > Get free e-mail and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1 > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message