Re: HEADSUP: arp-v2 has been committed

Hi Harti,

Let me first preface this e-mail by saying that you and I have had
very little contact prior to this. The comments below are meant to
explain the point of view of myself and that of a number of other
developers with whom I have spoken, not to criticize you or trivialize
your point of view.

>> - you just removed a lot of code and left the ipNetToMedia table
>> entirely disfunctional.
>>
>> - you obviously did not test the change. Otherwise you would have seen
>> that it did not work.

Even those of us well versed in networking are not familiar with all
subsystems. I know that whenever someone breaks a subsystem that is
important to me that I am indignant. That is natural. Although Sam
Leffler reviewed much of the code before commit, and I
(re-)implemented all of the locking, we have to accept that there was
really only one person working on this. He publicly asked for a review
many times and made a good faith effort to test all of the dependent
network subsystems that he could. However, at the end of the day the
code goes in and bugs get fixed as they crop up. Most of us feel that
he has done a commendable job in dealing with issues promptly.


>> And another point: when changing external interfaces it might be
>> possible to ask for a full port build with the changes to look for the
>> fall-out on ports. I would say that this commit was a good candidate
> to
>> get the port maintainers into the boat earlier.
>>
>> not so happy,

The only reasonable way to do a full ports build is to ask portmgr to
use the build systems. Although it may now be possible with svn, in
the past there was no way for him to do that for out of tree code.
Hence portmgr does not share your point of view.

What we should have done is grepped for RTM_RESOLVE and the flags that
I removed.  However, that did not occur to me. He asked on numerous
occasions for review and someone should have brought it up then. We do
not feel that it is reasonable to hold him solely responsible when he
did not act in a unilateral fashion.

Thank you for taking care of that bit of breakage.

Cheers,
Kip



-- 
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