2.3.51 tulip broken

[Christopher Smith]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Fri, Mar 17, 2000 at 10:47:38PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> David Ford wrote:
> > Jeff Garzik wrote:
> >
> > Please explain how his code development is closed source?  This is
> > totally BS and you know it.  All the code is available, all the
> > list discussion is available, and patches and requests are
> > accepted all the time.
> >
> > Quit it.  His development is quite open.  Resolutions come when
> > the mud stops being thrown.
> Donald's development is not open AT ALL.  Read Donald's own description
> of how he developed the 2.3 network drivers and interface (pci-netif). 
> He disappears for many months, creates a design without interfacing with
> kernel developers, and then appears again with a code drop.
> 
> It is classic cathedral style of development.  Read Eric Raymond's paper
> on why the bazaar method is far, far superior.  The Linux kernel is the
> bazaar method, and this is the central conflict which forced the kernel
> and Donald drivers to diverge.

Just for the record, cathedral style of development is indeed
open-source. There's nothing in the open-source definition that says
you can't do cathedral style development. Indeed, in The Cathedral and
The Bazaar ESR characterizes the FSF's development practices as
cathedral style development, and while he's critical of their
practices, he doesn't even begin to suggest they aren't doing
open-source development.
 
> Yes, the end result of Donald's work is open source, but his development
> is not open at all.  And therein lies the problem [which existed far
> longer than I have been hacking on the net drivers...]

It's not like you can say someone's "development" is not open source and
the end result is not open source. Reread the open-source
definition. It's very clear that one is not required to publish all
development, merely that software can't be distributed without the
source. Donald, and many other open-source developers, does not
release his software until he's ready, and that's fine. As I said
before, most FSF software has followed this development cycle.

If you read The Cathedral and The Bazaar more carefully, you'll see
that ESR specifically suggests it's a good idea not to release
software until it's reached the stage of "plausible promise". From the
sounds of it, this is exactly what Donald has done. He's sat down,
thought about a design, and when he's got it ironed out enough that he
knows it's a good idea, he releases it. When he releases stuff, it's
not a fait accompli, I'm sure he expects people to find bugs in what
he's doing (I sure would ;-). However, if he were to release software
before he'd ironed out in his own mind how the software worked, he's
not likely to get a lot of interest/support.

Sometimes, it's useful to have good architecture. Certainly, in the
area of network drivers, Linux's history has been spotty. The design
of the networking layer has, in whole or in part, had to be redone a
few times. This should suggest that if someone wants to do the design
right, it might take them a while before they've thought it out enough
that it's ready to be released to the outside world. I don't begrudge
Donald one bit for doing so.

There does come a time when things need to be rewritten from scratch,
and when that happens, sending small patch files just isn't
possible. (Indeed, if small patch files were possible I'm sure by now
someone would have taken Donald's posted code, broken it up into
patches, and sent them to Linus.) I can understand why Linus might not
want to throw in a huge update into the kernel all of a sudden, but I
think it's unfortunate that some of the 100's of eyeballs out there
don't take a look at Donald's designs and try to understand them
before they prematurely dump them and come up with a quick hack.

- --Chris
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.1 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.5 and Gnu Privacy Guard <http://www.gnupg.org/>

iEYEARECAAYFAjjTJrIACgkQfrrCpthD+UaFpACg2pp51hr/Ki8JtP/ry9rL+1O0
ExQAnA0TyAha67AdnAoG3dyOs7V3i88f
=711A
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe send a message body containing "unsubscribe"
to linux-tulip-request@beowulf.org