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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.questions:5086 comp.os.386bsd.misc:997 Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.os.386bsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!lynx!random.ccs.northeastern.edu!news From: jtsilla@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu (James Tsillas) Subject: Re: A merge of FreeBSD and NetBSD? (Another person's opinion) In-Reply-To: haley@husc8.harvard.edu's message of 12 Sep 93 18: 31:42 GMT Message-ID: <JTSILLA.93Sep12213741@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu> Sender: news@random.ccs.northeastern.edu Nntp-Posting-Host: damon.ccs.northeastern.edu Organization: Northeastern University, Boston, MA References: <1993Sep8.231610.9740@ccds3.ntu.edu.tw> <CD190K.FwG@latcs1.lat.oz.au><CD3JII.F5w.1@cs.cmu.edu> <26p8ul$1eb@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <MYCROFT.93Sep11213749@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> <haley.747858702@husc8> Date: Mon, 13 Sep 1993 02:37:41 GMT Lines: 50 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. 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 management system and some good will among all the parties involved. The first is easy to obtain, the second is much more difficult. Professionally, I work as the SC/CM specialist amongst a group of thirty software developers. Our product is the network OS of a high speed router-bridge. It is not uncommon for us to have three major release and one beta release in the field and under development (whether maintenance or new development) at any given time. In addition to this we have some five or six divergent/experimental efforts towards the development of new features which our customers demand. We are also pursuing different hardware architectures and there is usually at least 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. 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 to provide a branch structure for the parallel efforts. The major (or "main" branch) can be used to keep the latest stable source for the next stable release while the several minor branches can be used to keep unstable source for experimental releases which may be merged to the major branch on a selective basis. I believe that RCS can provide 100% of what you need to make this happen. regards, -Jim. -- *** James Tsillas jtsilla@damon.ccs.northeastern.edu *** *** Work: (508)898-2800, Home: (617)641-0513 *** *** "He is after me. Jim is after him." *** *** - Hop on Pop, Dr. Seuss ***