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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


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