Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 21:21:22 +0200 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD hackers) Cc: abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us Subject: Re: Commercial vendors registry Message-ID: <19970414212122.VV36149@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199704140653.BAA00534@dyson.iquest.net>; from John S. Dyson on Apr 14, 1997 01:53:02 -0500 References: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970413203337.6395A-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> <199704140653.BAA00534@dyson.iquest.net>
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As John S. Dyson wrote: (I have somehow missed the article John was replying to, thus i'm commenting both here.) > > there is one "distributor" for FreeBSD -- Walnut Creek, but it doesn't > > really organize or supports anything of that kind). > > > I am not involved with WC, but I heard that they do have support. Yep, they now officially announce that they support their customers, on the CD cover. They did `inofficial' support for quite some time before. > > and not fall apart instantly, distribution that supports upgrades > > that could be done by user with minimal knowledge about OS internals > > > You mean the kernel of the week syndrome? Nope, John, we seriously lack a good upgrade system. Jordan has been throwing some ideas around, i've also got something in mind regarding the /etc merges, but nobody ever really put any energy into organizing a usable upgrade system. The existing `upgrade' option in sysinstall is nothing else but a stop-gap measure. It basically works, and gives people some form of an upgrade path, but it's far from being a Good Thing. > > Both Linux and FreeBSD change fast, although FreeBSD comes in one > > monolithic distribution, and any attempt to get something fixed throws > > user into -CURRENT (no pun intended but it seems appropriate) with all its > > instability and experiments around. > > > Not true, 2.2.X is a new released codebase. It isn't -current. Things get > fixed in the 2.2.X base. Right, and i'd also like to point out that there's always the possibility to read the commit logs and extract any patch you'd like at least via the WWW interface. Not to speak of the CVS tree, as John already mentioned. Mind you, i'm also operating a small ISP here, that's where my private internet access goes. The servers there run FreeBSD (big surprise :), and of course, we aren't maintaining them on any sort of a patch-of- the-week basis. However, we occasionally apply security and functional patches to the system as required, without doing a `make world', or other heavy-weight actions. One example of a functional patch that was quickly applied was Bruce's fix for the broken SLIP behaviour. I still remember the days when i've been developing on commercial systems, and the many times where i've been seriously wanting this ability, to fix just one thing that was urgent for me, without upgrading an entire machine. Now, i can even get the source patches by the operating system ``vendor''. > > FreeBSD technically is a nice OS. Organization of its development and > > distribution looks umm... unhealthy. Funny. You didn't notice that most of our userbase who know both, Linux and BSD, and have chosen BSD in the end, did it since they found its development better organized? Only few people care about benchmarks or that. > You mean a central group of people who are trying to maintain quality and > branding (FreeBSD)? Or a bunch of distributions with a bunch of different > combinations of shared libs and apps (and kernel versions, Linux)? I prefer > a coherent development path/group. It is pretty good that we have > 70+- committers that can modify the tree directly, and don't have chaos. > In fact, we are pretty well organized. I've also done commercial software development at my previous employer, and i must now say that the degree of organization, the CVS repository maintenance (hi Peter :), the quality of the resulting code, the general mutual agreement of how things are done, etc. are _way_ advanced compared to the commercial development. For the latter, there was a constant time pressure leading to releasing code where you as the developer knew that it wasn't ready for prime-time (and trust me, this hurts, and finally gets you into an apathic state about the quality of your code). There often have been heated discussions about relatively minor things like a style guide. The internationally distributed FreeBSD project has currently spent maybe 5 hours into discussing stylistic issues, around the time when we emitted style(9). That's with 70-odd developers. At said software development company, we were about 15 developers, distributed at two locations 650 km away, and we've been spending hours and hours into a style guide, with loads of paper where style(9) is just nothing compared to. Needless to say, we could never agree on anything generally acceptable, simply since the chief developer attempted to press his ideas of good style to all the other people, totally ignoring that stylistic problems are personality problems you cannot regulate up to the last TAB. And, it was never possible to even use CVS there, since some of the upper-level guys were too conservative about it. RCS was all that was to be, and i finally (by a time when i've already been about to leave them) proved that they've got a problem by locking some of the sources for the duration of my own development when i knew that another group of people also needed to access them. :-] (By that time, i've already been a FreeBSD committer, and thus knew how much better things were going with CVS.) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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