On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 04:30:26PM +1000, Andrew Snow wrote:
I think FreeBSD is getting in a difficult position now because
there's
so much cool new stuff being shoe-horned in, but without the
necessary
volume of contributors to back it up with testing and bug fixes.
On Sep 15, 2008, at 11:56 PM, Mark Linimon wrote:
We're interested in suggestions about how to get more people involved
with testing and bug fixes.
There's certainly no lack of demand for the features -- all the way
from
running on inexpensive wireless routers all the way up to 'enterprise-
grade' distributed storage solutions. (These are real examples from
various mailing lists.)
So, in your opinion, what's the way to reconcile all these demands
(features + stability + long-term support of release branches) with
a group that is 95%-plus volunteer effort?
As I have said to you directly in personal e-mail, the maintenance
schedule is creating a chicken and egg problem. If companies weren't
forced to run internal distribution and release management on their
own, they could allocate more resources (ie volunteers -- PAID ones!)
to testing and release management of the main distribution.
To speak personally from my own experience: our business can not
afford to pay me to help develop a release effort with an unknown
maintenance period (6.4-REL). Since we need to have a clear
maintenance window for any installed/upgraded host, we are forced to
provide that support internally.
If we had known (and longer than 12 month) maintenance periods for a
given release, then I could avoid maintaining this infrastructure
internally and would have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 hours a
month I could dedicate to testing and bug fixes of FreeBSD as a whole.
--
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source
and other randomness
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