On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 01:43:50PM +0100, Antoine Jacoutot wrote: > One could answer you that the BSD community is not involved enough with > upstream. 99% of the development is done on Linux by developers using Linux > -- if you want that to change, some !linux people should get involved in > outside projects... I'm not saying I agree nor disagree with that statement, > I'm just being the devil's advocate.
Been there, done that... I've spent quite some time trying to work with the FSF on tools like GCC. At some point, I've mostly given up, I'm not patient enough. The GCC rules were as follows: - all development happens on their -current branch, which was often a few years from making a release. - it takes sometimes months until you get an answer on a patch. Very often, it's about some style nits that they could have given you right away. (but since you're not a 1st tier, nor 2nd tier platform, be already happy you got an answer). - by which time, -current does no longer compile on your platform, due to some other issue, which obviously doesn't affect linux, but that you have no way to fix, as it is deep within the compiler. File a bug-report.. - with luck, another 3 months later, somebody fixed -current, and it works again. By which time your initial patch (which was never committed) no longer applies at all, and you're stranded, having to do it all over again. - also, you have an assurance that that work will only show up in released versions a few years from now, as they never backport anything but very critical fixes to old versions (and by definition, OpenBSD is never critical). they also made some technical choice, such as making it impossible to build gcc without gnu-make, that we never had sufficient clout to battle... I'm very happy to let pascal@ or kettenis@ deal with them directly. I don't have the patience to fight that particular fight anymore...