Re: propose: all arch move into a separate dir

On Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:01:30 +0100 "Svein Skogen (Listmail Account)"
<svein-listmail_at_stillbilde.net> wrote:

> On 05.03.2010 11:48, Alex Keda wrote:
> > On 05.03.2010 12:59, Doug Rabson wrote:
> >> On 5 Mar 2010, at 09:56, Alex Keda wrote:

> >>> It seems to me, business and freedom - are mutually exclusive
> >>> things. or you can choose the path of development, or who pays -
> >>> giver commands to community.
> >>> no freedom there.
> >>>      
> >> Someone always pays. If this project didn't have sponsors like
> >> Isilon, NetApp, Juniper, Yahoo, and many others it simply would
> >> not exist. 
> > 
> > then can a more correct name of the project or ClosedBSD or
> > ManagedBSD? =) or something abstract?
> > ==========
> > I love FreeBSD, but then having to follow the guidance of someone
> > even though everyone understands what you can do better -
> > depressing.
> 
> Oh, so because a lot of the programmers behind it receive wages, and
> the project itself won't commit ritual suicide by basically blocking
> the companies using FreeBSD from returning improvements they make to
> the project itself, it should be renamed.

There's maybe a little bit of misunderstanding here...
1. FreeBSD is free
   - you are allowed to do more with it than with e.g. GPLed software
   - we (the FreeBSD developers) are free to do with it what we want
2. if there is more than one person involved, it is better to have some
   rules everyone has to follow
   - to not stomp on each others toes
   - to have progress instead of catching up with changes of others
     (you want new features and bugfixes, don't you?)
3. companies are not involved in how FreeBSD is managed or what is
   allowed to reside in the FreeBSD source tree, but we listen what
   they tell us about their needs and constraints to be able to make
   decissions which are beneficial for FreeBSD (as we want that they
   give back some work to improve FreeBSD)

Some examples:

C does not require any style guidelines, but in FreeBSD we enforce a
programming style. This is not to make it look nice, this is to make it
more easy for all of us.

The API in a stable branch does not need to be stable to get out a
working OS, but it is better for the users (and we developers are
users too) of FreeBSD to have the ABI stable.

In the same way we are free to move around files in the development
tree as we want, but we restrict ourself to not do it if not abolutely
necessary, as we have the experience that this causes a slow-down for a
lot of people (I am not even talking about companies which use
FreeBSD in their products, I talk just about the pure
development in the FreeBSD-project itself), and as such for FreeBSD
itself.


For those (and some more but similar reasons), there will be not such a
change soon.

Currently there is a somewhat related change going on, the i386, amd64
and pc98 bits which are the same, get merged into a common tree (a lot
of code is shared, but the build infrastructure was not up to the task
of sharing the files until recently). This is done because the benefit
of moving those specific files outweights the burden of catching up
with this change. For all other architectures there is currently no
real benefit in moving the files, it would only cause a lot of time
spend in merging the changes into another directory and making sure
everything still works.

While other people in this thread point to various companies which
support FreeBSD (either with contributions, or as sponsors for various
related events), I want to point to those developers, which do *not*
get paid to work on FreeBSD. Those people do it "just for fun" in the
time of the day/week/month they reserve for FreeBSD. Those with a tight
schedule (e.g. because of family/kids) care IMO more about how this
time is spend, than technicians which get paid to spend time with
FreeBSD. Personally I am not interested in spending a lot of time to
move around changes and test them, just because someone thinks it
looks nicer this way.

I agree that it would be nicer, no doubts, and if I would be a person
working alone on one specific architecture, I would suggest to create
an arch directory and move "my" architecture there. But as soon as
there are more people working on one architecture, there needs to be at
least an absolute majority (if not more) of those people agreeing to
it. So far I count about 2 architectures which are maintained by only
one person (at least as far as I noticed), but I can understand if
those people do not want to spend their time doing a time consuming
move (the build infrastructure needs to be adapted to handle both
cases then; and even if everything is moved, this is not a quick
search&replace).

Bye,
Alexander.