Re: Bazaaring the cathedral (Lowering the Barrier to Entry)

From: Fernando Apesteguía <fernando.apesteguia_at_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2015 12:08:29 +0200
El 02/04/2015 11:03, "Hans Petter Selasky" <hps_at_selasky.org> escribió:
>
> On 04/01/15 18:55, Eitan Adler wrote:
>>
>> One of the key reasons for the lack of people is the high barrier of
>> entry to joining the FreeBSD project.  While every modern project uses
>> git (usually hosted on github), FreeBSD uses self-hosted subversion.
>> The use of git goes beyond just the choice of version control.  It
>> allows for workflows that FreeBSD can't even dream of.  The linux
>> kernel has no concept of a committer.  Instead anyone can clone the
>> git tree, build a kernel, and call themselves a Linux distribution.
>
>
> Hi Eitan,
>
> Before you speak so nicely about how Linux is doing things, have you ever
tried to submit a patch to Linux yourself? I have a bunch of candidates in
/usr/ports/multimedia/webcamd/work/webcamd-3.18.0.1/patches (Use this
latest tarball:
http://home.selasky.org:8192/distfiles/webcamd-4.0.0.2.tar.bz2) which you
can start with as a fun experiment ! And then write back when your done.
I'm starting counting right now.
>
> I have ported a lot of Linux USB drivers to userspace in FreeBSD through
the webcamd project, and quite frequently I need to make patches to make
the code compile which really should be up-streamed. Sometimes I also find
real bugs. Sending the patch to Linux-USB is easy. Getting attention to the
patch is hard. Frequent roadblocks in the Linux-USB:
>  - patch must be styled correctly
>  - patch must be send using a certain e-mail program
>  - patch must apply cleanly to the Linux GIT
>  - patch must have a signed-off-by before it can be committed
>

I suppose no project is perfect, but all of the above make sense to me. The
only thing I disagree is about the mail client. I've never seen that
restriction in the documents in the documentation directory of the kernel.
I've read restrictions about the format of the mails though.

> Speaking about USB I don't want FreeBSD-USB to become what Linux-USB is.
There are so many mails flowing into Linux-USB every day that no-one is
caring to read it all. Getting a decent reply from someone can take months,
because of the huge amount of e-mails.
>

Getting attention to the patch being hard is probably because of the amount
of patches sent every day, but with a fairly smaller stream of patches in
FreeBSD, we have some of them sitting in bugzilla for a really long time.

Cheers.

> --HPS
>
>
>
>
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Received on Thu Apr 02 2015 - 08:08:32 UTC

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