Re: Future of FreeBSD

> Robert,
> 
> 
> Thank you for taking the time to cogently respond to Atte Peltomaki's
> concerns regarding 5.X issues.
> 
> Not every FreeBSD user has time to keep up to date with the day-to-day news
> that is disseminated via the mailing lists. It's a lot of email to read on a
> daily basis.
> 
> As such, it's understandable that many FreeBSD users have a perception of
> the project that is not shared by committers.
> 
> Responding to email's such as Atte's in a rational, well thought out manner
> is much more productive than simply reacting in knee-jerk fashion by saying
> "Please don't feed the trolls".

I replied to Robert's mail personally without cc'ing to -current,
simply because I felt too many people saw my mail as a troll and nothing
more. Even those who didn't, mostly just disregarded everything I tried
to say, picked a detail in which I was incorrect and put me down with it.

I have indeed not been following all the mailing lists as keenly as I 
could've, and perhaps many of my concerns would not have surfaced at all 
if I had. But then again, reading through high-volume lists on a daily
basis without developer's interests or understanding can get frustrating 
very quickly. 

Now, I have gotten some precious information from Robert on the issues 
where I was downright wrong, and others were discussed to give reason and
consequence, why things happen the way they do, and why they should keep
happening. Most useful information was to learn about the effects of
ACPI with older hardware, which I have, and I realized many of the
problems I have seen are due to buggy hardware implementations in my
boxes rather than problems directly in FreeBSD. Though it still
frightens me to see how incompatible FreeBSD can be at it's current state
with older h/w, but Robert gave enough faith and I'm going to install
-CURRENT again on few of my boxes to get on with it and solve the
problems. 

It still leaves me wonder - why is the user/developer-base so hostile
towards any critique on the system? I'm nonetheless a supporter of
FreeBSD's, and as much as any of you, would like to see a glorious
release of the 5-STABLE when time is right. I simply wanted to state
some of my concerns as a user about the time and it's rightness amongst
some other things, and indeed only Robert took the time to actually
answer to me. Thank you, Robert, for that.


Atte Peltomaki
http://kameli.org