Heavy I/O blocks FreeBSD box for several seconds

[Ulrich Spörlein]

On Wed, 13.07.2011 at 00:40:49 +0300, Gleb Kurtsou wrote:
> On (11/07/2011 16:36), mdf at FreeBSD.org wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 4:00 PM, Ali Mashtizadeh <mashtizadeh at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Maybe someone can setup something like reviewboard [1] for developers
> > > to use. This may also help folks who want to keep abreast of the
> > > current work in a particular subsystem or get involved into the
> > > development process more. At my company we use reviews and it seems to
> > > help the catch some bugs and help new engineers ramp up faster.
> > >
> > > [1] http://www.reviewboard.org/
> > 
> > FreeBSD development is completely open; anyone can sign up for the
> > svn-src-* mailing list they are interested in, including
> > svn-src-head at .  Code reviews are plenty as well; just check the list
> > archives for discussion of bugs, poor design choices and unintended
> > effects.  But most reviews are silent and after-the-fact by looking at
> > the list mail.  It's a system that seems to be working just fine for
> > the FreeBSD project so far.  This isn't a job for most anyone; it's a
> > volunteer project and so anything that raises the barrier to getting
> > work done for the project should be looked at with skepticism.
> 
> I agree with everything said above and think that it's not reviews
> that's missing. By review I don't mean something like getting "ok to
> commit" reply from N developers before committing. svn-src@ works
> great for it, commits keep getting reverted :) Review is a time
> consuming process that also requires certain level of expertise.
> Volunteer project can hardly afford it.
> 
> Having a project adopted way of sharing work in progress will be a step
> forward. Yes, I'm aware of perforce, it's to hard to use and wasn't
> designed to share and test ideas. I think guthub can be a very good
> candidate (but AFAIK it won't allow hosting of FreeBSD repo for not paid
> accounts). I'm not suggesting switching to git as VCS, but using github
> UI for communication and tracking not yet commited or work in progress
> changes. In ideal world developers will merge patches from each other
> increasing chance of a good code to survive and get commited later.
> Currently we have patches hosted at people.freebsd.org, as attachments
> on maillists and PRs -- almost all stale or outdated. Key difference of
> github is that original patch author will be aware of you using it,
> potentially updating and improving it. Others can continue supporting
> the patch if original author abandons it, etc. Sending patches is too
> complicated and counterproductive comparing to github.

Yes, I fully agree, that's why https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-head
exists today, but hasn't been advertised yet (I need to write
documentation and can't force myself to do it :(

Feel free to start using it! Together with the git-svn metadata that you
can grab from repos.freebsd.your.org it makes a solid platform for
working on FreeBSD code.

Uli