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Date:      Sun, 17 Aug 1997 16:31:16 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>, FreeBSD Hackers <hackers@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: reset screen hardware?
Message-ID:  <19970817163116.16698@lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <13880.871792654@time.cdrom.com>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on Sat, Aug 16, 1997 at 09:37:34PM -0700
References:  <199708170311.MAA04998@freebie.lemis.com> <13880.871792654@time.cdrom.com>

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On Sat, Aug 16, 1997 at 09:37:34PM -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
>> If there's one thing that pisses me off about many FreeBSD hackers,
>> it's this attitude "Ooh, this is nasty.  I don't want to have anything
>> to do with it".  Lots of PC hardware is nasty.  Messing around in a 16
>> bit BIOS is nasty.  IDE is nasty.  VGA is nasty.  Come to think of it,
>> what's nice about PC hardware?  But FreeBSD's acceptance suffers
>> significantly because nobody can be bothered to deal with these nasty
>> things.  Where's the Win-32 emulator? ...
>
> Funny, my bigget rant has to do with people going "Why doesn't FreeBSD
> have feature XXX?!" rather than "Here are my diffs to support feature
> XXX, please integrate them."

And would you?  If I had come along with the diffs for doing it this
way, you'd have said (with some justification) "Go away, we don't want
all this crap in the kernel".  I was, in fact, considering doing the
implementation, but I see that it's not the way to go.

> Why?  Well, we'd have support for a lot more "nasty" stuff if there
> were more people around who were willing to do the actual
> implementation work and be willing to actively support it afterwards
> so it doesn't go stale (like the 1st ISDN drivers, for example).
> That's the real problem here.

Well, since you mention the ISDN stuff, I seem to recall we would have
got it in the kernel long ago (like about March 1996) if it had been
approved by the core team .  That was before Dietmar Friede got bent
out of shape about something or another.  The lack of ability to
commit the code was one reason why the effort seems to have lost
focus--if that is the case.  I no longer live in an area where ISDN is
a viable method to connect to the net, so I'm on analogue again, and
I'm not following the ISDN groups too closely.

Greg



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