[BusyBox] Improving Our Development Process _after_ 0.49

[Mark Whitley]

On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 09:23:15AM -0800, Larry Doolittle wrote:
> I appreciate all the discussion on this subject, and
> it even sounds like progress.  I will resist commenting
> on _my_ prejudices for how the directories should be laid
> out, how many binaries to build, what files to split out,
> and how many build options to give the "customer".

On the contrary, I would very much like to hear your opinions on re-org.

> I _will_ guarantee that busybox/tinylogin/netkit-tiny
> et al. will suffer major breakage during the transition
> to a more long-term maintainable project architecture.
> 
> BusyBox has seen a significant number of bugfixes and
> core improvements in The last six weeks.  That needs to
> be checkpointed and announced as an 0.49 release, _before_
> we start a major reorganization.

Agreed, and I hope Erik has assuaged your concerns with his emails.

> Questions I have for 0.49:
>     Can we resolve the buffer allocation issue any better?
>        (like choosing stack vs. xmalloc at compile time)

As I mentioned in a previous email, please handle the other five cases and
I'll apply your patch.

> Anything else?

Yes, I have one other thing to add: One of the big items I mentioned at the
beginning of this thread was that we'd like folks to take "ownership" of some
of the applets and be the 'official' maintainer. If y'all are willing to
"adopt" one or two applets, it will really help lighten Erik's load and
(hopefully) help the development process by spreading the load out more
broadly.

I've made a quick (and very dirty) script that extracts original authors from
the *.c files and made a draft of a maintainer list. You can see it at:

	http://busybox.net/~markw/applet-maintainers.txt

The script that generated the list is here:

	http://busybox.net/~markw/getappmaint.sh

Please email edits/corrections to me (or to the mailing list). Anyplace you
see the author as a blank or as 'Lineo Inc.' that means it's up for grabs and
you're welcome to adopt it. The same is also probably true for anyplace where
you see 'Erik Andersen' as the author (although you should probably clear it
with him first).

Adopt an applet today!

Cheers,

Mark Whitley
markw at lineo.com