*BSD News Article 37243


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From: hpeyerl@sidney.novatel.ca (Herb Peyerl)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.0 - a status report.
Date: 29 Oct 1994 14:59:34 GMT
Organization: NovAtel Communications Ltd.
Lines: 47
Message-ID: <38to0m$k6d@fw.novatel.ca>
References: <38j31l$6nf@agate.berkeley.edu> <38puin$gp@masala.cc.uh.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: sidney.novatel.ca
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Woody Jin (wjin@moocow.cs.uh.edu) wrote:
: As far as I have  seen, there were many problem reports regarding on
: PCFS.  But I have not seen the request for SCO binary support (or did I miss
: it ?).  Are you working on the PCFS or is it left as it was ?

: I believe that if you have a to-do list, these (reliable PCFS and
: Wine support) should be on top of the above SCO binary support,

This attitude that people have completely boggles my mind.  You people seem
to think that we do this work to meet some sort of marketing niche or
as a job.

You are sadly mistaken.  This work is actually done because we *want* to.
And you can't make people do what they don't want to unless you're paying
them.

Let me give you a slight correction of the mental processes that people
go through when they contribute to *BSD:

WRONG: "Lets see, what's on the TODO list? hmm. the next thing is this
ethernet card that I don't have and don't have any documentation for. Ok;
I guess I'll do this".

RIGHT: "Cool. I just found this nifty ethernet card in a box at work; I
wonder how it works. Lets write a driver!".

WRONG: "Lets see, the next thing on the TODO list is MSDOSFS support.  Hmm.
Now I have to buy a copy of DOS so I can make a partition. Hmm.. Now I 
have to repartition my disk which means reinstalling the whole thing. Hmm.
I've never used DOS and now I have to learn it? ick."

RIGHT: "Hmm.. I bet if I just wrote this small modification to kern_exec.c,
I could probably load an ELF executable and run it.  Hey cool; it works!
Hey guys, guess what I did? Now I'll see if I can make shared libraries
work."

If something is broken, report it.  If you can fix it yourself, do so.

The concept of the TODO list is so other people can look at it and say
"Hey, this looks kind of neat, maybe I'll try and do this."

(as usual; I don't speak for anyone but myself.. blah blah blah)

--
hpeyerl@novatel.ca                           |  NovAtel Communications Ltd.
hpeyerl@beer.org                             | <nothing I say matters anyway>
  On your birthday 10/02 322 BC: Aristotle dies of indigestion. [hmm]