Now I'm curious...

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Sunday 02 September 2007 09:14, Rob Landley wrote:
> The official uClibc tree has seen 35 patches since the 0.9.29 release.  That 
> tree hasn't been touched in a month.  The uClibc-nptl branch (scheduled to 
> become 0.9.30) was last touched 5 weeks ago, and before that 4 months ago.  
> The last time the uClibc maintainer posted to this list was in May.  It is 
> now September.
> 
> The uClibc project is, for all intents and purposes, on hiatus at the moment.
> 
> Meanwhile, Peter S. Mazinger says his uClibc tree has 1194 commits relative to 
> 0.9.29.  (That's one thousand, one hundred, and ninety-four.)  I just had a 
> longish conversation with him on #gentoo-embedded on freenode, during which 
> he showed me how to patch uClibc/Rules.mak to get armv4l soft-float working.
> 
> Peter unsubscribed from this list almost exactly one year ago, due to 
> disagreements with Manuel Nova and Steven Hill:
> http://www.uclibc.org/lists/uclibc/2006-March/015014.html
> 
> Manuel's objection was that Peter was making too many changes and checking 
> them into the development branch, which was making it hard for other 
> developers to keep up:
> http://www.uclibc.org/lists/uclibc/2006-March/015018.html
> 
> Steven's objection was that he was getting paid to do large uClibc changes 
> out-of-tree, none of which would be merged until the end of the contract, and 
> that changes to the public tree in the meantime made more work for him 
> keeping his out-of-tree stuff in sync, and therefore Steven wanted Peter to 
> stop interfering with Steven's contract by doing rapid unrelated development:
> http://www.uclibc.org/lists/uclibc/2006-March/015048.html
> http://www.uclibc.org/lists/uclibc/2006-March/015049.html
> 
> Peter's last post (asking how to unsubscribe) was August 25, 2006.  Steven and 
> Manuel got what then wanted.  Does it seem to anyone else here that a year 
> later, the result is that uClibc development has effectively ground to a 
> halt?
> 
> I'm poking Peter to put out a release.  I'll let you know if he does.  (I'd 
> happily send _him_ a cake, but he appears to be in Europe...)

uclibc development indeed is a bit too quiet for my tastes, yes.

After reading those mails it seems to that Manuel and Steven simply didn't
trust Peter's code enough to allow him to commit stuff to head and feel
more-or-less comfortable with taking head at some pelease point
and use it for production systems.

They basically say thet they were maintaining head in a much more
stable form before that.

The truth is, stability and development are mutually exclusive, if you want
more stability, you inevitably lose some development speed.
And this is exactly what happened.

How the current situation can change:

We can decide to allow more unstable uclibc svn head, with the agreement
that when it will be decided to do a release, we will have x.x.0 unstable
and people will work on fixing on the regressions for x.x.1, x.x.2,
_especially_ on the regressions caused by *their* changes.

Between releases, people who need stable uclibc will use last stable
release, and add bugfixes for that release to it's own stable branch.

This doesn't mean that any developer with write access can dump
any kind of untested half-baked code to head. It is expected that it
compiles and has at least some sort of testing done, and it is expected
that developer will be responsive for bugs discovered in it and reported
on mailing lists.

IOW: we can try to buy a bit of development speed by sacrificing on
head stability. We can try to trust people with write access a bit more
that they will be good at fixing their own breakage.

I think it is worth trying, but I am a very small player in uclibc field.
--
vda