> Is this formal decision of core team ? I feel a huge despair, as a > member of newconfig project ....
This was a core team decision, but I really do hope we can still figure out some way of working together on a final hybrid of the best ideas from both projects since this honestly wasn't done with the intention of making the newconfig people unhappy, please believe me. This is simply one of those unfortunate situations where two groups of developers have worked in relative isolation from one another and come up with more or less the same thing, the difference with new-bus being that we were working just that much more closely with Doug Rabson (and the others helping him) and had already used the new-bus stuff for FreeBSD/alpha. The core team did not make this decision lightly and there was considerable debate over it until we finally made the decision to take the clearest choice we could see before us and simply synchronize the FreeBSD/alpha and FreeBSD/x86 code bases. I also have to say that this has pointed out, once again, that communication is really lacking between the various groups, especially in situations where a language barrier exists. Most of us didn't even know about the newconfig project until comparatively recently, and I didn't even really know about it until I saw you guys submit a paper for the FREENIX track at USENIX. Doug's new-bus stuff, on the other hand, was a well known factor for at least a year and, as I noted, had already made it to the Alpha platform, getting it to the x86 simply being a project which was delayed by many various factors. It would, in fact, probably have gone into FreeBSD 6 months ago if everyone involved had simply had a bit more free time. However this situation came about, the core team also ultimately had to make a decision one way or another and no matter *which* alternative we picked, somebody was going to be the "loser" so it wasn't even as if we had that many good alternatives. The discussions on merging the two efforts really didn't seem to be going anywhere and the more we watched the two groups talk the more it seemed like they simply weren't going to converge on their thinking on this. I don't really like the word "loser" very much, however, and would much rather that everyone focus instead on the best route forward from here since we've made the decision, for better or for worse, and need to figure out some way for everyone's best ideas to still "win" in some way. With that in mind, I would be more than happy to take you and all the other newconfig project people out to dinner at the upcoming USENIX conference, perhaps with Satoshi serving as translator, along with Doug Rabson and any other new-bus people who'd like to come. Rather than sinking into despair, we really need to start discussing how to fix the communications problems we've had in the past since that will be addressing the *cause* rather than the symptoms of our current problem. I also truly feel that much can still be salvaged in a number of different ways if we're willing to put the well-being of FreeBSD first and foremost in our minds, and I'm more than happy to do anything I can to make that happen. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
