`busyboxvi` is not working like before

Laszlo Papp lpapp at kde.org
Fri Oct 31 20:08:24 UTC 2014


On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 7:52 PM, John Spencer
<maillist-busybox at barfooze.de> wrote:
> Laszlo Papp wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 6:11 PM, Laurent Bercot
>> <ska-dietlibc at skarnet.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> But when the problem is finding a maintainer with
>>> enough time, expertise and willingness to maintain a project, forking is
>>> definitely not a solution - on the contrary, it would only exacerbate the
>>> problem. You were struggling to find one person, now you must find two.
>>
>>
>> Not quite, no. What I see is that Denis is the ultimate maintainer and
>> *no one* else is allowed to commit changes from the contributors.
>>
>> On the contrary, I have seen a *lot* of bikeshed on this mailing list
>> about insignificant details. The end results usually were missing
>
>
> what may seem like insignificant details to you is actually what busybox is
> about : providing a very small, nonbloated implementation of the standard
> command line utilities. if anything anybody wants gets merged/implemented,
> busybox turns into a second GNU coreutils.

It had nothing to do with that. That is _not_ the point. The point is
whether I like blue or pink... There have been a lot of that, sadly,
argued to death.

>> features due to completely irrelevant implementation details in my
>> opinion. I still remember one of my first patches that got more than
>> 100 emails in that thread and the whole thing was about bikeshedding,
>
>
> yeah, that's what usually happens when certain people are involved in the
> discussion...
>
>> again IMHO. Apparently, many people have resource for that, but not
>> actual pragmaticism!
>
>
> [ snip ]
>
>> busybox --list | wc -l
>> 351
>>
>> Does anyone here really think that one person can maintain 351 applets
>> alone? I think it should be acceptable for others to stand up and not
>
>
> definitely.

(LOL...) Yeah, right.

> note that these applets are already complete and working.

Yeah, that is why there are serious hazards coming up every single
week or month, right? I may have even underestimated that.

> denys did an excellent job in the past even though he has a dayjob that
> likely consumes the biggest part of his time.

He did an excellent job as what one very limited person can do, but
the problem here is much bigger: _why_ is there one person here only?
Has he scared people away that could have stepped up or just he could
not make anyone interested in helping with maintenance or he just did
not want anyone helping him?

These are real questions to consider because busybox will always get
complaints (just like openssl did until the fork) if it remains this
way. I actually stepped aside with these issues until I saw other
people bringing them up, too. I assumed I was just ignored here as an
exceptional case, but apparently not...k

>> to have an exclusive person here responsible for everything. I am sure
>> that there have been applet authors who would have been happy to give
>> a helping hand with maintaining their code pieces.
>
>
> "too many cooks spoil the brew".

Sure, let us leave for instance Linus with maintaining the Linux
kernel alone, too, without others giving ACK... No, that would be a
very bad idea in my opinion.

> my impression is that sw projects with a small number of maintainers work
> much better than those with a big number like KDE, where the left hand
> doesn't know what the right hand did:
> the result is bloat (due to duplication and feature-creep), and bugs (due to
> insufficient review, and missing overview over the whole picture).

I am sorry to hear that you are misinformed about KDE.


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