HEADS UP! [Re: Apologies]

[Scott Long]

Peter Jeremy wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-May-22 10:37:09 +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> 
>>In message <20060522080255.GB730 at turion.vk2pj.dyndns.org>, Peter Jeremy writes:
>>The main reason it does not work is that whenever some feature is
>>put on notice, a number of very vocal people will come out defending
>>exactly that feature as the only reason the world still exists etc.
>>
>>Eventuallyy, somebody will grudingly say "I'll take responsibility
>>for this code".
>>
>>And then nothing continues happen.
> 
> 
> I think it needs to be made clear that the deadline is for the submission
> of fixes, not just saying that "I'll look after it".
> 

Tried this with Alpha, it doesn't work.
> 
>>In the case of PCVT this would have been amounted to:
>>
>>	"Fix PCVT to be SMP locked, do the right things with TTYs,
>>	work with whatever is the state of the art in keyboards.
>>	And do so before August 1st OR ELSE".
>>
>>Now, in your own mind, think for a moment what would have happened
>>if I had sent that email out...
> 
> 
> With due respect, you _do_ have a reputation...  Kris (effectively)
> writes this in ports commit messages regularly without the world
> ending and he hasn't been lynched yet.  I suspect that if the above
> mail had come from core@ (or their proxy), there wouldn't be much of a
> problem.
> 
> 
>>It follows logically that the only way to be sure to keep any given
>>piece of code alive is to become a developer and maintain it yourself.
> 
> 
> I agree.  I'm not offering to maintain pcvt.  I'm just surprised at
> the apparent haste with which it was dispatched.  If I missed an
> earlier headsup, my apologies.
> 

HEADS UP: Assume that any kernel code that is not compiled by default in
GENERIC + modules, and has not had a commit in 3 years, is fair game for
review and deprication.  I'm serious about this.  This actually covers
only a very small fraction of the code out there, but if someone wants
to take this statement and exaggerate it for their own silly political
statement, beware that I will find you and hunt you down and ridicule
you until you stop =-)  It is the truth however, and this is the
heads-up for it.

HEADS UP: I beleive that Robert Watson and several others are also
trying to publish a HEADS-UP about non-MPSAFE network drivers for 7.0.
I fully support what they are doing there also, since it will allow a
number of performance improvements to the network stack that would
otherwise be impossible.  But if your billion dollar webhosting
company relies on 15 year old ISA 10mb cards, you might want to pay
attention and make appropriate plans.

Scott