Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 19:03:29 -0800 From: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>, Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>, Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org>, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>, Jordan Hubbard <jkh@winston.freebsd.org>, Dallas De Atley <deatley@apple.com>, arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: __P macro question Message-ID: <20020131030329.2E01C3A9A@overcee.wemm.org> In-Reply-To: <3C58A07A.49792083@mindspring.com>
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Terry Lambert wrote: > Giorgos Keramidas wrote: > > > For example, taking the TCP/IP stack by itself, with all > > > the DOS attack hardening and other hardenening, and using > > > it in a system other than FreeBSD. > > > > I'm afraid that even in that area, the changes and differences between > > the original Net/[123] code and the -CURRENT trees of BSDs are far > > more than a simple __P() change. One who has to maintain the changes > > done already in other parts and subsystems of the kernel that the TCP > > stack changes depend on, has a lot more work to do. > > > > I somehow fail to see the point of all this... > > The point is that if I were wanting to use a freely > available reference implementation of TCP/IP, right > now I would prefer to use FreeBSDs implementation, so > long as it remains portable to my platform. Well, our network stack is nowhere near K&R compliant, not by a million miles. So forget that line of the argument. > One of the *points* to using Open Source code at all > is to reduce your maintenance burden and bootstrap > overhead. Ahh you see, that is a problem. The FreeBSD project's purpose is to make a viable free operating system, not to bend over backwards to make it convenient for other vendors who want to take our code and run it on a cpu from 1974 with a compiler from 1973. We the project have no such obligations. *If* our code is useful, then go for your life. If not, then too bad. We have no obligation to *support* some arbitary fictitious vendor who is so damn cheap that they want to save 3 seconds of engineer time to run unprotoize on components of our source tree. > While it is valid to state that there is other work to > do, that other work is unavoidable. We are talking > about increasing the avoidable work here. If you add up the number of developer hours that have been wasted over the last 8 to 10 years on this subject and reapply it to kernel development, we'd have *finished* SMPng by now. As far as I'm concerned: Kill it, get it over with, and rid ourselves of the ongoing drain of developer time that you seem to enjoy contributing to. Cheers, -Peter -- Peter Wemm - peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com; peter@netplex.com.au "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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