The remaining part of the quote is more interesting ;)
Since it came up in the /. thread, though, I would like to make one correction. It’s widely claimed that I’m “the one” who ejected Theo from the NetBSD community. That is false. At that time in NetBSD’s history, Chris G. Demetriou was playing the role of alpha male, and I wasn’t even given a choice. I was certain it was going to bite us in the ass. I think the question for historians is not whether it did bite us in the ass, but how many times and how hard.
I think you have to take the date of the article into account (2006).
Some things that are still all too relevant is the comment that package management in the Linux world is rather a mess - specifically around the lack of visibility around upstream package maintainers, and the unnecessary fragmentation of packaging and tools across two major formats with several minor variations.
I also think the Github “pull request” model can go a long way towards alleviating some of the concerns voiced in the interview - you get full transparency and each pull request is open for community review. It’s not perfect, especially if the project owner in question is a tyrant and never accepts a single PR, but it’s a step in the right direction.
I was actually reading this the other day, especially intrigued by the alleged “coup” by Wasabi (which, ironically, has now long as lost its funding and has long as disappeared into the void), and have then stumbled upon http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/text.jsp?case=D2015-0976, which provides an interesting introduction to UDRP. :-)
Did mycroft do any *BSD work since, or shown any appearances?
I can’t even begin to describe how much of a loss this has been. We honestly had (and have) developers who think that changing all the line-ending whitespace was really important. Or that whether there are some “legacy” K&R-style prototypes actually matters. These people go around committing non-functional changes, which makes source management (and specifically patching and merging) really painful, and which, unfortunately, also often breaks things accidentally. What’s worse is that sometimes they don’t even bother trying to compile it, much less test it. I wish I was making this up; I wish more that I had made these people go away a long time ago.
Unfortunately these people exist everywhere. They seek to make themselves look busy/important, while changing the code to make themselves feel more comfortable. Its the Peter Principle in code.
Would you like to talk about the fork that originated OpenBSD?
Charles M. Hannum: No.
The remaining part of the quote is more interesting ;)
Heh, yeah I was going to include that too but I liked the awkward silence of the whole thing :)
I think you have to take the date of the article into account (2006).
Some things that are still all too relevant is the comment that package management in the Linux world is rather a mess - specifically around the lack of visibility around upstream package maintainers, and the unnecessary fragmentation of packaging and tools across two major formats with several minor variations.
I also think the Github “pull request” model can go a long way towards alleviating some of the concerns voiced in the interview - you get full transparency and each pull request is open for community review. It’s not perfect, especially if the project owner in question is a tyrant and never accepts a single PR, but it’s a step in the right direction.
I was actually reading this the other day, especially intrigued by the alleged “coup” by Wasabi (which, ironically, has now long as lost its funding and has long as disappeared into the void), and have then stumbled upon http://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/search/text.jsp?case=D2015-0976, which provides an interesting introduction to UDRP. :-)
Did
mycroftdo any *BSD work since, or shown any appearances?Unfortunately these people exist everywhere. They seek to make themselves look busy/important, while changing the code to make themselves feel more comfortable. Its the Peter Principle in code.