Re: On cooperative work [Was: Re: newbus' ivar's limitation..]

On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 7:05 PM, Arnaud Lacombe <lacombar_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 12:40 PM, Attilio Rao <attilio_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Arnaud Lacombe <lacombar_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 4:14 PM, Attilio Rao <attilio_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> You don't want to work cooperatively.
>>>>
>>> Why is it that mbuf's refactoring consultation is being held in
>>> internal, private, committers-and-invite-only-restricted meeting at
>>> BSDCan ?
>>>
>>> Why is it that so much review and discussion on changes are held privately ?
>>
>> Arnaud,
>> belive me, to date I don't recall a single major technical decision
>> that has been settled exclusively in private (not subjected to peer
>> review) and in particular in person (e-mail help you focus on a lot of
>> different details that you may not have under control when talking to
>> people, etc).
>>
> Whose call is it to declare something worth public discussion ? No one.
>
> Every time I see a "Suggested by:", "Submitted by:", "Reported by:",
> and especially "Approved by:", there should to be a public reference
> of the mentioned communication.
>
>> Sometimes it is useful that a limited number of developers is involved
>> in initial brainstorming of some works,
>>
> Never.
>
>> but after this period
>> constructive people usually ask for peer review publishing their plans
>> on the mailing lists or other media.
>>
> Again, never. By doing so, you merely put the community in a situation
> where, well, "We, committers, have come with this, you can either
> accept or STFU, but no major changes will be made because we decided
> so."
>
> The callout-ng conference at BSDCan was just beautiful, it was basically:
>
> Speaker: "we will do this"
> Audience: "how about this situation ? What you will do will not work."
> Speaker: "thank you for listening, end of the conference"
>
> It was beautiful to witness.
>

Well, my talk was mainly there to collect some opinion on how to
continue my work.
IIRC, the only one objection was on supporting callout execution from
hw interrupt context. Mainly, the objection moved was that there were
no practical applications for that. It turned out I found some, and in
any case it wasn't "it will not work" but "probably it's not an effort
you want to put because the consumers that can exploit some
functionality are few". I wasn't really so familiar with that so I
hesitated in answering. In any case, I liked a lot the objection moved
by Attilio because it gave me the possibility to investigate and find
out the right direction. As you may see, there's a branch in projects/
in which the feature that "won't work" is implemented, so, maybe
you're missing something.
If you had some concerns on it you can raise up your hand and tell:
"hey, that sucks". It would be better than getting this feedback after
3 months of work honestly. I have nothing in contrary about getting
feedbacks (negative or positive). But probably you belong to that kind
of people that are able to tell only behind a monitor, so this is my
last word on the topic.
Get a life.


>> If you don't see any public further discussion this may be meaning:
>> a) the BSDCan meetings have been fruitless and there is no precise
>> plan/roadmap/etc.
>>
> so not only you make it private, but it shamelessly failed...
>
>> b) there is still not consensus on details
>>
> Then the discussion should stop, public records are kept for reference
> in the future. There is no problem with this.
>
>> and you can always publically asked on what was decided and what not.
>> Just send a mail to interested recipients and CC any FreeBSD mailing
>> list.
>>
> This is not the way "openness" should be about.
>
>  - Arnaud
>
>> Attilio
>>
>>
>> --
>> Peace can only be achieved by understanding - A. Einstein
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-hackers_at_freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscribe_at_freebsd.org"

Davide