On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 12:23:44AM +0530, Mayuresh Kathe wrote: > Its good to know that Ted did indeed try to scratch an itch of his and > laid down some ground work for future developers to take it beyond its > basic level. > But, it would have been *nicer* if Ted had put in some more of his > time and effort to complete what he started. > Also, we don't get to use his code for FREE, I suppose most of the > users *buy* CD sets.
This is an outrageous comment. You can not expect anyone to do anything for you. That simply is not how this world works. You can wish for things all day long but that will not make it so. What will make it so is by spending huge amounts of time and effort. He put both in and got it to a point that was good enough for him. You can not expect anything more than that. This really is where the OpenBSD "shut-up-and-hack" mentality comes from. Who are you to tell Ted what to do? Would I like rthreads? sure I would! I even contributed to the code that's how bad I want it. But I can and will not ask Ted to do anything beyond what he wants to invest on it. Buying the CDs keeps the project going. Ted does not get paid or benefit otherwise from the project. In fact he shows up at hackathons and invests significant amounts of his own money to do so. You are insulting not just him but everyone in the OpenBSD project saying these things. > The problem that would get solved would be best presented by the > following article http://research.sun.com/minds/2007-0710/ I didn't read anything that fixes any problem that exists today. Sure it's a neat research project, no debate there. Whenever or if it becomes interesting in the real world somebody in this project will re-evaluate its merit. > Not really, I'm not insulting you or any of the core developers. > What I meant is newer features. > Why is it that our soft-updates based file system can't do background 'fsck'? Because what the other projects did is wrong. A background fsck renders a system useless. I don't think having a background fsck that prevents my machine from booting is about as useful as not having it. Do I want it? of course I do but not bad enough to write the code myself. > True, your investment as well as *ours*. How are you investing? Typing up an email does not constitute "investment". Sweating over a few lines of code for days on end is. > Agreed, but wouldn't it be better if there was some kind-a list of > features most requested by users who can't/don't code in C? > Then you core people could keep an eye on that list and think through > your problems keeping that detail in mind. We can make lists all day long but if they are not put to use it doesn't change anything. My softraid to-do list is out there and effectively I have received no help (read code) from outside the project. Lots of enthusiast users and great test reports however no code and that is the hard part. Several other developers have lists and I am sure they'll share this same sentiment if asked. > Nothing of that sort, I don't _expect_ developers to do what I ask > for, in fact I've got very few needs above what the system is offering > me right now, just that it hurts to see rest of the projects getting > some nice features which we too would've got had the developers > focused and *completed* what they started. Again you don't get to vote on what another person spends their time on. I have seen other projects get "nice" features and seen them replace them later because it wasn't what it was cracked up to be. One of the best examples must be SCSI mid-layers in just about every other project. They keep replacing them for a few new features and they bloated an area that has to remain slim. While the OpenBSD mid-layer certainly misses some features they are not prohibitively and more importantly we were right; the add-on features have not brought any concrete benefit to the other projects. Just NIH and vanity. > I'm not belittling the developers, just that I really got irritated > when I lost 5 of the best developers (who were going to start work on > a new TCP/IP stack) I'd gathered because Ted lost interest in his own > work. Every time you say "would be nice", "they should" or "why not?" you are belittling someone's blood sweat and tears. Ted gave you the starting point, go ahead and finish it. That is cooperative code development in action.
