Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 18:36:31 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: terry@lambert.org, julian@whistle.com, khetan@iafrica.com, hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd@iafrica.com, danielc@iafrica.com Subject: Re: Terry Message-ID: <199701220136.SAA20588@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <19361.853887384@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jan 21, 97 02:56:24 pm
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> If you were simply going to the right destination by a slightly > different route then this analogy would hold and we'd have little > excuse for asking for different directions. So put up signs pointing out the direction. The whole purpose of having a small core team is to provide the project with a unified vision, isn't it? What good is that if the only place there are signs is on the restricted access campus? > I believe that Poul-Henning has also offered you a complete machine to > place your sources on, in their *entirety*, if the task of breaking > the changes down in a way that others can easily follow is simply > beyond what you have the time or inclination to do. If you are > sincere about our requests for decomposition being the only obstacle, > then I strongly urge you to contact Poul-Henning after reading this > email and take him up on his offer. He has already stated several > times, the last time being no more than half an hour ago (on another > list) that he'd be more than happy to review your work even in its > complete, unfettered glory if you're willing to put it up somewhere > where he can actually get at it. > > I cannot see how a more reasonable offer than this could be made by > anyone. I will be taking Julian up on his offer once I can get a new CVSup set up for my local machine, and start migrating changes. Wherever Poul offered "half an hour ago", I haven't seen it; was the other list the core team list? I'm not on that list. In any case, I plan to take Julian up on his offer... though I was led to believe that the effort wouldn't be worthwhile until the Lite2 integration was complete (something Poul and I *had* discussed when he originally made his offer right before my accident). Is it now worthwhile because the Lite2 integration is complete? Or is it now worthwhile because the Lite2 integration has been scrapped? > No, I have already given you two alternatives which would let you > drive it all in one stretch with nothing but a bottle of benzadrine > and a plastic jesus hanging from your rearview if you so choose. I did that once. I ended up in Cleveland instead of Salt Lake; it's kind of you to offer to let me set out for Cleveland again, though. ;-). > > You can't even agree on what a good design would look like beforehand; > > A good design for what, Terry? Since you're using food analogies > here, let's say I'm a Chef. You ask me: > > T: "Hey, Monsieur Jordan, exactly how do you prepare your meals and what > sort of planning do you do before you start?" > > J: "Well, what sort of meal, Terry, and for how many people?" [ ... ] Actually, it's "what kind of food are you up for?" so I don't have to list all the restaurants in town for you to say "no" one by one until we get one you like. If you are up for ziti, say so, so that I don't have traverse the whole damn alphabet looking for it. > > As a specific example: The failure to even define what an acceptable > > build system should look like so that there is some reasonable > > assurance of acceptance of the work, after the effort is to be > > expended on spec., has blocked out at least two "warm bodies". > > Now hear this: Nobody, and I repeat, nobody is going to define an > "acceptable build system" for you or anyone else. "Acceptable" in > this particular context means "works for all our tools and solves > problems which are unsolved by the current build system" (or there > wouldn't be much point in doing the work), and if I'm going to do all > the work of designing a new framework, verifying that it works for all > the conceivable build situations and is architecturally sound, then > I'm bloody going to go the rest of the way and implement it, no doubt > to find other problems with my logic along the way - nothing else > makes much sense. Actually, I just mean "acceptable" in the sense of "capable of being accepted". That's why I used that "able" suffix and didn't use the word "guarantee" in there anywhere. > Richard claims he needs carte-blanche with the build tree to > do a number of unspecified and yet-to-be-defined things to it, none of > which he's been willing to even put out for review. I never heard Richard ask for that, and I doubt Richard would agree. > You want a spec > to follow or some sort of "happy meal" in a convenient box, but who's > going to do the work of providing you with all of that? And having > done all that work, why wouldn't they simply follow through with it > themselves rather that trying to wet-nurse another engineer through > their design? I'm asking for you to tell me what the shelf where the happy meals are stacked looks like so I can build a happy meal that won't fall on the floor. I'm not asking you to build happy meal boxes for containerized transport. Yes, having a standard box for happy meals would be nice, but it's not required for me to be able to keep them off the floor the way knowledge of the shelf is required. > You also consistently fail to grasp the concept of incremental > introduction. I grasp the concept of evolutionary progress... I simply don't bow to it as if it were a god just to keep all the peasants bowing along with me. It is inefficient compared to revolutionary progress, and it's typically what public companies resort to when they have a 3 month limit on their ability to work without demostrating progress, or an entrepeneur resorts to when he falls back to crisis management instead of delegation to reduce complexity because he's afraid to let go of the reins and trust the horse. If I seem adversarial on the issue, it's because I *loathe* inefficiency. "Beaming down" is a hell of a lot faster than a shuttle craft, even if you can't ask "is Dr. McCoy 30% of the way to the surface?" at a particular instant during the transport, like you could if he were on the pokey old shuttle. > You and Richard have never really given us that opportunity, > demanding immediate entrance to the inner sanctum or nothing, and your > own most significant contribution to the project, LKMs, came in a > rather round-about fashion as I recall and I don't think that you > personally oversaw its incorporation or have shown yourself in any way > willing to subsequently work on incremental improvements to it at all. Gee, and I always though my most significant contribution to the project was building the first patchkit: the seed that grew into the project, when Bill Jolitz revoked permission for a 386BSD 0.5 release after a number of patchkit people had a nice public fight with his wife over nothing. And then, that was only because Bill revoked permission to use the name "386BSD" because I (stupidly, in retrospect) suggested he trademark the thing. You're well aware (or should be) that the LKM system was submitted as alpha code to all the BSD camps immediately before the purchase of USL by Novell made my unable to oversee anything without legally endangering the code base in view of the USL/UCB/BSDi lawsuit. You're also well aware (or should be) that it wasn't until October of 1995 that the term of my agreements with my former employer expired, and that contamination risk from submissions of real code went away. I would also note that FreeBSD didn't adopt the thing until well after NetBSD has done so, and although fine work, most of the stuff CGD did to it did not really change the base character of the code at the time of its adoption. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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