*BSD News Article 83967


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From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: PPP Masquerading in FreeBSD Distributions?
Date: Sun, 01 Dec 1996 03:14:16 -0800
Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM
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Message-ID: <32A16888.2781E494@FreeBSD.org>
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To: Charles Mott <cmott@srv.net>

Charles Mott wrote:
> I have neither the experience nor inclination needed for submitting code
> to the FreeBSD Central Committee (or should I say Politburo?).  For those
> who are interested in doing this, it is simple to merge the code with
> versions of ppp later than 2.1.5-RELEASE, which is the source base I
> worked from.

Then you essentially guarantee that it will never happen and probably
shouldn't even raise the issue if you're not willing to follow-up on it.

Please, you need to be willing here to understand a concept which many
programmers are unwilling/unable to grasp, and that's that software
*rots* when left to itself.  That means that merely taking on your
patches without anyone to "own" them is pretty much as good as saying
that it'll be dead and buried inside of 6 months, another legacy wart
which someone will only have to expend additional effort later in order
to remove.  This happened with the original ISDN code, it happened with
the device registration code and it looked like it was going to happen
with DEVFS except that the original author came back and started working
on it again.  All were very promising, well-intentioned projects when
they first started and in the case of the ISDN code, I even brought in
myself, I was that enthusiastic about the prospect of having a working
set of ISDN tools to start with.  The fact that the code had no real
sponsor and a set of authors who subsequently went on to other things in
favor of continuing to work with us on it were what led to its
subsequent demise and removal, a waste of everyone's time.

So please don't hurl around epithets like "politburo" just because we're
unwilling to further engage in bad software engineering practices which
we've learned to avoid the hard way.  If you're willing to support this
code in FreeBSD and be responsive to bug reports, I or someone else
among the almost *70* other committers (a pretty large committee, I'd
say) will be happy to help you integrate it.  If all you're interested
in doing is the equivalent of a drive-by shooting on the FreeBSD ppp
code base, however, then we are most definitely not interested and will
wait for someone who's in it for the long-haul to present a similar
solution.

The solution to the IP proxy problem *is* very much desired. A
bandaid-and-run approach is very much not.

-- 
- Jordan Hubbard
  President, FreeBSD Project