Date: Sat, 27 Mar 2021 20:23:13 -0400 From: Mark Johnston <markj@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: statement on FreeBSD development processes Message-ID: <YF/McQsSKT%2BrmPni@nuc>
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Dear FreeBSD Community, In light of the recent commentary on FreeBSD's development practices, members of the Core team would like to issue the following statement. Code quality is an essential FreeBSD value: From the 1980s when work on BSD became the de facto standard TCP/IP stack, to our more recent work around performance scalability on multicore, attention to detail is critical. The recent concerns regarding the WireGuard patches remind us that our development processes must always continue to mature. While the project has historically, and aggressively, led the way in adopting new development methodologies - from public version control to being early adopters of static analysis tools such as Coverity - these events have brought to light a real gap that needs to be addressed. The high stability and quality of FreeBSD is a testimony to the experience of our developers. As in any open source project, we rely on developers to exercise good judgement in seeking review and committing new features, and to follow the guidelines laid out in the Committer's Guide. We make heavy use of public code review, and FreeBSD developers spend a significant amount of time improving each others' contributions. We were excited to provide a kernel WireGuard implementation in FreeBSD 13.0. Before the if_wg(4) rewrite was committed, several FreeBSD developers proactively worked on fixing bugs and writing tests and documentation for the original implementation. In other words, we had spent time during the release's Q/A period looking for problems, and that unfortunately culminated in if_wg(4) being removed from 13.0 during the release cycle. As FreeBSD developers, it is incumbent on each of us to support each other's work by providing code review and helping test and fix the code. This incident highlights the need to do this work more proactively, and to maintain a robust, multi-layered development process that can catch problems as they fall through the cracks. Over the next month the FreeBSD Core Team will lead a discussion on appropriate pre-commit testing, static analysis, code review, and integration policies to avoid a repeat of this situation and to continue improving FreeBSD's code quality. We know there will be challenges in key areas, such as third-party device drivers, and components of the system where fewer developers have sufficient expertise. The FreeBSD Foundation has full-time staff members participating in significant code review today, and is committed to supporting the needs identified by the Core team and the developer community for this effort. We look forward to input from the community on our proposals for updated policies as we move forward, maintaining high code quality as a core value for FreeBSD. Thanks, -Mark, with core@ hat on
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