On 4/6/2013 04:43, Mindaugas Rasiukevicius wrote:
Well, do you need an invitation? I try to answer most of the emails (as
my free time permits) about NPF. If DragonFly developers have an interest,
I am glad to answer questions or suggest on potential difficulties you might
experience while porting NPF. After all, this would result in extra testing
and perhaps contributions to NPF, while DragonFly community would hopefully
get a decent piece of software.
I've been speaking for myself and not the rest of the DragonFly project.
That said, a formal invitation at the beginning of the NPF development
along with identifying NetBSD-specific interfaces at the beginning and
implementing abstractions then would have been ideal. From my vantage
point, NPF seemed as much "it's for us, we don't care if it's ported or
not" as PF does. I'm not accusing you of thinking that way, only that
this is the final result.
At this moment, I do not think there are any architectural NetBSD-specific
parts. Obviously, NetBSD has different interfaces and you might find that
adopting some (e.g. ptree(9) interface) might be less problematic than
converting. On the other hand, I would consider abstraction or interface
adjustments to make supporting of a different system easier.
That's kind of you. I'm sure that both would probably have to occur.
The DragonFly project have no problem in adapting functionality when it
has clear advantages.
<...> And there's the point that it's not even production ready.
Can you ground this point? While there are still important milestones to
complete, I think NPF version which will ship with NetBSD 6.1 has a pretty
stable feature set.
Mainly I was basing this on the fact that NetBSD 6.1 hasn't been
released. People don't use Release Candidates in production. It's also
logical to expect that with 6.1 will come a lot of use, and that will
reveal some issues that the developers didn't discover. Maybe NPF is
rock solid out of the gates, and that would be quite an accomplishment,
but it doesn't have a "CV" yet.
I think you understand that I'm not trying to offend. It would be great
for DragonFly if NFP works on it, and I wouldn't be surprised that an
attempt to make this happen occurs when NPF is proven. If we had a
bigger team, then maybe this attempt would have happened by now.
Regards,
John
