Date: Sun, 13 Jul 1997 15:33:18 +0200 (CEST) From: torstenb@ramsey.tb.9715.org (Torsten Blum) To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: asami@cs.berkeley.edu, current@FreeBSD.ORG, hans@brandinnovators.com Subject: Re: Heads up and and a call for a show of hands. Message-ID: <m0wnOm6-000KgcC@ramsey.tb.9715.org> In-Reply-To: <16159.868757788@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at "Jul 12, 97 06:36:28 pm"
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Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> What you've seen as behind-the-door commits in these two occasions
> (/var/mail and ld.so.conf) are not the result of some secret vendor
> cabal...
Maybe, maybe not. My Problems with those two cases:
- both requests came from the same vendor
- there was no discussion before the commit happened
- they're bad examples and might result in a bad signal to other vendors.
If we continue with this (adding features without "asking") other vendors
will do the same...
> On these two occasions, the subsequent flame wars which erupted were
> characterised more by their heat than by their light, and as I don't
> have a lot of time for highly emotional arguments which serve no
> reasonable purpose other than to piss all over some feature without
> proposing a reasonable, concrete solution to the same problem, or are
> driven by what seems to be some greater need to harp endlessly on some
> diversionary topic of convenience rather than spending the energy more
> constructively working on real (and harder) problems, I basically
> switched off it after a few days.
Another Problem with such "features": As soon as you have at least one
release with it, it becomes hard to replace it with a better but different
and incompat. method. _This_ causes our _users_ problems and this is the reason
why we should think about it before a commit.
Dunno about Satoshi, but I am worried about the recent commits. In both
cases the requests came from XiG and they "need" it for CDE.
Maybe this will cause a real flame war, but...
I think one of the reasons why both requests were accepted is the FreeBSD/CDE
bundle.
I don't have anything against companies making money with FreeBSD and/or
their own software (I even do it myself), but I expect those people to use
existing mechan. (/usr/{local,X11R6}/etc/rc.d is one of them) or fix a
bug (/var/mail).
-tb
--
Torsten Blum, Friedensstraße 13a, 82110 Gemering, Munich, Germany
"Wow, die Leute hier von DEC schreiben Ihre Dokumentation mit LaTeX...
Ich bin im gelobten Land... Es gibt also die kommerzielle - PC und M$
freie Welt" -- Arne Steinkamm
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