Is there some sort of shakeup going on?

Terri_Kennedy

Terri_Kennedy

A cvsup from earlier today showed dougb relinquishing maintanership of a number of ports, with commit messages like:

ports/dns/bind99/Makefile said:
Throw my ports back in the pool, and make my intentions clear for the various ports that I've created.

I bid fond fare well
A chapter closes for me
What opens for you?
Click to expand...

I don't see anything about this on the freebsd.org homepage, and all of the FreeBSD mailing lists are reporting "Error 503 Service Unavailable". http://people.freebsd.org/~dougb/ gives a 404 Not Found.

I sense a vast disturbance in the Force...
 
No, these are two unrelated events. dougb decided to leave. At the same time, there is a project switching many of the main FreeBSD systems to a different facility. Don't panic.
 
I'm new to FreeBSD, so I don't know who Doug is...
Yet thanks for all the development, and thanks to everyone else that has worked and keeps on working with FreeBSD.

I really, really, reeeaalllyyy like this OS!
 
UNIXgod said:
Is there someone lined up to take over portmaster development?
Click to expand...

Or rather, with the impending /var/db/pkg >> /pkg/; csup >> svn; new port options framework; deprecation of portmanager... is there some equally adept coder to temporarily, or longer, oversee the portmaster development ? Just wanting to "me too..."
 
Even these posings only show a fragment of the whole picture, and it is one that seems to be EOL anyway. It seems like this has been going on some time already and now it is way too late to mend anything.

I would like to thank dougb for all his work and commitment, life is too short to bear all what we might want to. So take what way you want, and maybe it will lead you around the other side of the mountain and meet us again.
 
In the short term, the ports and programs that doubg maintained so well are in excellent condition and will continue to work. In the long term, other people will take over maintaining them. In some cases, there are alternatives, like ports-mgmt/portupgrade and -devel, which are now maintained by bdrewery@. So, again, don't panic.
 
FreeBSD 9.1-RC2 is on the ftp servers since October the 1st. Yet there is no announcement and the main site still shows FreeBSD 9.1-RC1.

The way things are moving lately it really reminds me of an old Jack Daniels commercial.

If it was just someone who left the project for personal reasons then everything would be fine. But I think that this should be a wake up call...
 
gkontos said:
FreeBSD 9.1-RC2 is on the ftp servers since October the 1st. Yet there is no announcement and the main site still shows FreeBSD 9.1-RC1.

The way things are moving lately it really reminds me of an old Jack Daniels commercial.

If it was just someone who left the project for personal reasons then everything would be fine. But I think that this should be a wake up call...
Click to expand...

I don't know the commercial (link?), but I fully agree with the rest of your post.

Doug may have been blunt in his wording, but he usually made good points and raised valid concerns. It's a shame it has come to this.
 
gkontos said:
FreeBSD 9.1-RC2 is on the ftp servers since October the 1st. Yet there is no announcement and the main site still shows FreeBSD 9.1-RC1.

The way things are moving lately it really reminds me of an old Jack Daniels commercial.

If it was just someone who left the project for personal reasons then everything would be fine. But I think that this should be a wake up call...
Click to expand...

Really, everything anyone does is for personal reasons.

When developers leave, it is not necessarily permanent or necessarily a bad thing. Think of it more as a band breaking up. Creative people often have creative differences, and sometimes they do better in different groups or on their own.

As far as the project, there are lots of big changes going on at the same time. pkgng is out, many of the servers are being moved, ports just changed over to svn. All this is going on at the same time as a release is being prepared. It's a lot of work, and almost all of it is being done by unpaid volunteers who also have real lives. So things will be unsettled, and then they will settle down again, and the process repeats. It's a good sign, in the sense that things that need work are getting it. If you can, help out. Submit PRs, or donate time, equipment, or money. Or explain to an employer how it will help them to have their employees contributing back to FreeBSD.
 
People come and go and nobody is truly irreplaceable. We have a saying in finnish that translates to roughly "a war does not depend on one man".
 
I will generalize and maybe deviate to the point of being off topic.

I recently had to set up an IPsec LT2P VPN server with radius authentication.

I tried to do that with FreeBSD and spend almost a full day. I used 4 different KERNELS combined with security/ipsec-tools or security/strongswan. In all cases the results did not meet my requirements. I had to make this work for OSX, Windows7, IOS and Android clients.

It took 20 minutes to make that work with Ubuntu 12.04

I am also involved in building ZFS based storages. I can safely say that my experience with ZFS has evolved a lot since FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE. Yet I struggle daily to deal with issues that are only addressed in CURRENT and (maybe) MFC to STABLE. I am seriously considering of switching to Oracle and pay the license instead of having to deal with stupid issues that should have been already solved.

Most of my clients demand stability. Stability and bureaucracy often go along. Using a Prerelease or Beta or RC for months might sound like a good choice to us. But for high rank IT personnel, who need to cover their ass, this is a no go situation. For the shake of the argument please have a look at the differences in code between RC1 & RC2.

Journal UFS2. It was finally released in FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE. But wait, there is a bug and you can not backup a UFS2+J fs!!! Ok, has it been fixed? Yes but we don't issue an errata because it is not a security issue!!!

A new next generation package management tool is announced and it is supposed to be the default for FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE. But wait, we don't have enough mirrors to support it!!!

The list can go on and on and on... The point is not to blame the developers who are involved here. A foundation is supposed to be behind all this to support and fund the project. Because a project can not survive without a project manager. And because a successful project is a project that is being used.

I don't care if you produce the best car in the world. If no one is driving it then you have nothing.

Just some bitter thoughts from a FreeBSD advocate.
 
He can't leave. He has to go through me before he leaves.

Besides all that, I just learned portmaster and don't want to have to re-learn somebody else's utility.

Get him back over here so I can reprimand him.
 
gkontos said:
The way things are moving lately it really reminds me of an old Jack Daniels commercial.
Click to expand...
The one where they hurry some booze around the place like it was some old b&w slapstick?
(whistles innocently while looking at some scotch which passed voting age some time ago)

But I think that this should be a wake up call...
Click to expand...
+1
 
gkontos said:
Kind of old and cut off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WxIrkRrtlc

This might fit better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaIXj1Nh588
Click to expand...

In that case, no, that's not what I was thinking of. The problem here -in my mind- is not the change, but the way the changes are handled.

FreeBSD 8.3 was barely released as preparations for 9.1 got underway (as a result of the shortened release cycle that has us supporting two production releases?) and at the same time we're introducing pkgng, optionsng, new Makefile headers, replacing CVS with SVN, not to mention the ongoing work on clang (and to a lesser extent ZFS).

For a project, as wblock@ correctly states, handled mainly by volunteers, that seems like quite the extra workload for what I assume to be a virtually equal amount of developers / committers.

As a result, even though the feature freeze process was shortened, "big ticket" ports such as The Gimp 2.8 and KDE 4.9.x are waiting for updates and/or exp-runs, while we're technically not even in feature freeze yet.

Just before submitting I see gkontos' reply. I just have to add that I'm not bitter (but then again I haven't tried setting up LT2P VPN with radius either, net/mpd5 FTW).
This is just what I'm seeing, I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth, so I'll stop right here and get myself some proper whisky.
 
gkontos said:
A new next generation package management tool is announced and it is supposed to be the default for FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE. But wait, we don't have enough mirrors to support it!!!
Click to expand...

No, not until 10.0-RELEASE.
 
gkontos said:
FreeBSD 9.1-RC2 is on the ftp servers since October the 1st. Yet there is no announcement and the main site still shows FreeBSD 9.1-RC1.

The way things are moving lately it really reminds me of an old Jack Daniels commercial.

If it was just someone who left the project for personal reasons then everything would be fine. But I think that this should be a wake up call...
Click to expand...

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-October/069998.html

:P
 
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