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From: j@bonnie.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD's strengths
Date: 22 Aug 1995 15:13:01 +0200
Organization: Private U**x site, Dresden.
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:17873 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:4951
Brian Tao <taob@gate.sinica.edu.tw> wrote:
>>There seems to be a group moderating kernel changes instead of a person.
>
> A FreeBSD core team exists to approve and commit changes to all
>aspects of the source tree, not just the kernel.
Well Brian, to set this straight: there are currently 15 members of
the core team, but the list of commiters is beyond 50. The core team
wouldn't have a single minute available if they had to approve and
commit every single change. (It worked this way at the very beginning
of the project, but this scenario soon proved to be unusable.)
Commiters are requested to have their code modifications reviewed by
someone else before commiting (except for minor bug fixes etc.), and
most commiters feel responsible only for a rather small segment of
code (e.g. certain ports areas, a particular driver or userland
program that is maintained by this person etc.) and would rather avoid
touching everything else. The basic principle is responsibility: you
are responsible for your doing, and everybody who's breaking something
is expected to repair the damage immediately. That's the driving
force that makes people cautious against half-baked submissions
(unless they might be clearly imported as `experimental' in order to
widen the group of people involved), not the omnipresent core team
threatening everybody: ``You should not do this... you should
not...''. :)
(OTOH, the list of people allowed to commit into the bugfix-only
branch [currently the 2.1 branch] is rather restricted. However, this
is not enforced by administrative measures, it's just stated policy,
and everybody has to care.)
--
cheers, J"org private: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de
http://www.sax.de/~joerg/
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)