[oi-dev] Resignation

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On 12 September 2014 10:24, Nikola M. <minikola at gmail.com> wrote:
> illumos is a project payed by several companies that employed fully payed
> employees to develop it.

We have a mixture of commercial interests and unpaid, or at least
unaffiliated, contributors.  The obvious examples to cite are Rich
Lowe in general, or Saso Kiselkov when he was adding LZ4 support to
ZFS.

> If people outside those companies want to make changes, it is obvious that
> it is NOT enough just to send some code upstream and hope it gets
> integrated.

It is actually the case that, whether or not you work for one of
"those companies", it is _not_ enough to just "send some code".  If
you are an engineer, regardless of your employer or your motivations,
we expect you to provide evidence of several things:

  - that you have done a full build of the software, and
       that you have not induced compiler warnings or
       code style issues
  - that you have received code review from at least one
       person who has worked in similar parts of the code
       base already
  - that you have tested the software you added or changed,
       and any software the behaviour of which you may be
       altering
  - that you are not breaking public interfaces we expose
       to users, so that they can expect at least binary
       compatibility

If you work for one of "those companies", or not, you are expected to
provide the above.  If you provide the above, and the advocates are
satisfied that you are maintaining the quality of code in the gate,
then your changes will be put back.  It's as simple as that.

What is _not_ simple is that from time to time, people propose and
submit changes for review that will break other users of the software.
Or, people propose and submit changes that have received insufficient
review and testing.

Just because it's open source, community-developed software does not
mean that we should be lax on quality, or reckless with respect to
backwards compatibility.  For better or for worse, that's why we
accept changes the way we do today.

> People need to form clusters of users, Admins, Hosting and companies using
> distributions , to , again, employ their people , pay them or inspire
> existing employees or Members to contribute to make their job easier.
> More people join such clusters, it is better , not to let just a few
> companies move illumos to ,say x86-only , killing SPARC or something else.

If (or, frankly, when) we kill SPARC support, it will be because
_years_ have passed without any real engineering effort showing up to
do builds, testing and bug fixing on SPARC platforms.  It is, now that
SPARC is a legacy platform, not reasonable to expect the bulk of
(x86-focused) developers to do work, where platform-specific
differences occur, to prop up code that will likely not be compiled or
run by more than a handful of people ever again.


Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
UNIX Admin/Developer
http://blog.sysmgr.org