Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.questions:5048 comp.os.386bsd.misc:982
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!das-news.harvard.edu!husc-news.harvard.edu!husc.harvard.edu!husc8!haley
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: A merge of FreeBSD and NetBSD? (Another person's opinion)
Message-ID: <haley.747894008@husc8>
From: haley@husc8.harvard.edu (Elizabeth Haley)
Date: 13 Sep 93 04:20:08 GMT
References: <1993Sep8.231610.9740@ccds3.ntu.edu.tw><CD190K.FwG@latcs1.lat.oz.au><CD3JII.F5
w.1@cs.cmu.edu><26p8ul$1eb@pdq.coe.montana.edu><MYCROFT.93Sep11213749@dualit
y.gnu.ai.mit.edu> <haley.747858702@husc8> <JTSILLA.93Sep12213741@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu>
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
NNTP-Posting-Host: husc8.harvard.edu
Lines: 74
jtsilla@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu (James Tsillas) writes:
>Having two very similar (if not three) operating systems seems to me
>like a incredible waste of personal resource and will give rise to much
>duplicate (triplicate?) work for what appear to be simply religious
>reasons.
Ahh, but that is the point, it is not for "religious" reasons. There
is nothing at all wrong with having two sets of priorities in this
case. No-one is getting paid for this specifically, so no jobs are on
the line. This is the product of many fertile minds on the internet,
getting together to make something for society, as well as add to
their own experience. The fact that there are divergent groups is
merely a sign that those involved (most anyway) can disagree amiably.
One person says "Faster" someone else says "Stabler". They smile and
say "Can I see yer code once in a while", and then "Sure".
>There are no good reasons that I can see for keeping the efforts
>separate. The arguments that we need an experimental release of the OS
>in parallel to the stable release is no excuse for the parties to work
>independently. What is needed is a good source control/configuration
I would suggest that the groups are not exactly independent. If I
recall, there are those with close connections to both.
>management system and some good will among all the parties involved. The
>first is easy to obtain, the second is much more difficult.
This may be true. However, it is possible that portions would become
so divergent that it would amount to a waste of time to produce
deltas. On the other hand, I think someone said that the differences
were smallish right now. Back on the first hand, I would be somewhat
miffed if support for Freebsd were dropped because I can't easily
change over to NetBSD.
>one porting effort ongoing. Our customers demand this aggressive release
>and development policy and we've put alot of resources into perfecting
>the underlying methodology and process. My point is: it can be done. You
>can have the experimental branch and the stable branch working side by
>side and borrowing from each other in a coherent and managed way. It's
>not easy, and it takes at least a few dedicated individuals to keep
>things on track. But the results are much, much better than keeping the
>efforts separate.
1. A few dedicated individuals to keep things on track. This possibly
would mean someone spending time coordinating when they would rather
be hacking. This usually adds up to half assed coordination.
2. Experimental and stable working side by side. Despite the
wonderfulness of the internet, communication of the sort you are
suggesting requires MUCH interaction, of the sort one can get easily
at a work site such as yours. But the various members of the *BSD
teams are scattered across the country or world. Cgd is in CA, Nate is
in Montana, Charles Hannum is in Boston, Julian is in Australia!(?)
Sure there's the telephone. You want to pay their phone bills?
>I urge the developers of all 386BSD based efforts to carefully consider
>the benefits of a parallel release strategy using a good SC/CM system. I
>urge them to give a high priority to merging the two OS's and to reach a
>common code base. From there the source can be entered into a SC system
Actually there was talk back a long while about releasing patches as
RCS deltas.
Anyway, I am not suggesting that your ideas couldn't be implemented
somehow, but I do think that the amount of extra work is much greater
than you think.
--
If you love your fun...
|[{(<=--=>)}]|David Charles Todd, tHE mAN wITH tHREE fIRST nAMES|[{(<=--=>)}]|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||hacksaw@headcheese.daa.uc.edu||||||||||||||||||||||||
...Die for it!