Re: Question: should I even bother?

Bryan Liesner wrote:
> 
> Over the past few weeks, I have posted messages about panics
> that I've been having.  No answers at all.
> 
> Yesterday, I posted about a repeatable problem where dumps just
> destroy my IDE drive.  No answers.  Pretty serious problem. No, my
> swap partition doesn't start at sector 0.
> 
> Have I offended some or all of you somehow?  I'd like to contribute in
> some way...

Nah. It just happens. See, for instance, me. I'm a long time FreeBSD 
user, I have been a committer for the past four years, I have seen many 
of the present Core Team members become FreeBSD committers, and, I 
suppose, even helped one or two on occasion. I often talk directly, 
through e-mail or irc, with many other committers. I have submitted 
patches, patched, _and_ broken FreeBSD. :-) I have reasonable knowledge 
of what to do in case of panic (besides running around and kissing my 
ass goodbye, mind you :), and I know *where* to look up what I don't 
know, even though I'm too lazy to do it sometimes. I even know how to 
actually read all this stuff and find out what the problem is, though I 
almost always leave THAT to people who are actually familiar with the 
code, for many reasons. And, a lot of the time, I know *who* is 
responsible for the buggy code, or I know how to find that out (and that 
I'm not very lazy about :).

Still, it just happens (it happened this year one or two times) that I 
submit information about some problem, sometimes repeatedly, and no one 
takes notice of it.

And why that happens? Because, when all is said and done, this is still 
a *volunteer* effort. For something to get done, someone has to 
*volunteer* to do it, on his own time, without being paid a single cent 
to do it. And, actually, the money thingy is not nearly as much of a 
problem as the time thingy (though sometimes the former is the cause of 
the lack of the latter).

Well, that, and there are some lazy-bums committers like myself. :-)

Presently, there are two big efforts driving FreeBSD development. First, 
we are trying to make the final adjustments to -current before it 
becomes -stable. That includes some major rewrites of code in some 
cases, like, for instance, the ATA drivers. Second, we are in the final 
stages for the release of FreeBSD 4.9, and that also competes for attention.

So, between the first and the second, and the fact that there are many 
panics out there at the present, even very complete panic reports will 
end getting ignored. We are sorry that is there case, in the sense that 
we wish it wasn't. But we aren't really asking for forgiveness, because 
this is no one fault, it is just the Way Things Are. And, remember, this 
_is_ current. This is a place where actual development is actively 
taking place, and such environments are prone to periods of chaos.

The only help I can really give (I'm assuming you read the part on the 
handbook about how to report panics and, therefore, did report them 
appropriately), is trying to find who is responsible for the subsystem 
that is panic'ing, and contacting them directly. For that... well, ask 
here. :-)

-- 
Daniel C. Sobral                   (8-DCS)
Gerencia de Operacoes
Divisao de Comunicacao de Dados
Coordenacao de Seguranca
VIVO Centro Oeste Norte
Fones: 55-61-313-7654/Cel: 55-61-9618-0904
E-mail: Daniel.Capo_at_tco.net.br
         Daniel.Sobral_at_tcoip.com.br
         dcs_at_tcoip.com.br

Outros:
	dcs_at_newsguy.com
	dcs_at_freebsd.org
	capo_at_notorious.bsdconspiracy.net

Don't try to outweird me, three-eyes.  I get stranger things than you free
with my breakfast cereal.
		-- Zaphod Beeblebrox