Re: The direction linux is taking

Dave Jones
2001-12-27T18:37:48Z

On Thu, 27 Dec 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> This is absolutely true - it's a _very_ powerful thing. Old patches
> simply grow stale: keeping track of them is not necessarily at all
> useful, and can add more work than anything else.

*nod*, until they get scooped up into another tree -ac, -dj, -whatever
and fed to you whenever you're in the mood for resyncing.

> This is not about technology. This is about sustainable development.
> The most important part to that is the developers themselves - I refuse
> to put myself in a situation where _I_ need to scale, because that would
> be stupid - people simply do not scale. So I require others to do more
> of the work. Think distributed development.

Absolutely. When I decided to take on carrying the 2.4 patches in sync
with 2.5, I knew I was undertaking something of no small order.
Scooping up forward port patches, and silent-drop bits from l-k
is almost a full time job in itself when yourself and Marcelo release
kernels in quick succession 8-)

And when you're ready to resync what I've got so far (currently ~3mb),
it's going to be another full time job splitting it into bits to feed
you linus-bite-sized chunks. (ObSidenote: When this time comes btw,
if maintainers of relevant parts want to feed Linus their relevant
parts from my tree, that would be appreciated, and would keep _my_ load
down :-)

> We've seen this several times in Linux - David, for example, used to
> maintain his CVS tree, and he ended up being rather frustrated about
> having to then maintain it all and clean up the bad parts because I
> didn't want to apply them (and he didn't really want me to) and he
> couldn't make people clean up themselves because "once it was in, it was
> in".

"Used to" ? cvs @ vger.samba.org was still being maintained before
I went on xmas vacation. Did I miss something ?

Dave.

--
| Dave Jones. http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
| SuSE Labs