[ros-dev] Roadmap I'm sticking to

[Peter Millerchip]

Ged - I actually agree with everything you're saying! However, I see
it as a "do what you want" ethic - I'll explain inline below:

On 9 April 2010 12:45, Ged Murphy <gedmurphy at gmail.com> wrote:
> Basically, there's many branches, stable and experimental, and many teams to
> look after these branches. These people are experts in the areas which their
> branch targets, e.g. scheduler, memory manager, etc.

Yes, these people are "doing what they want" in that they maintain a
branch which is of interest to them. These branches started because
someone would say "you know, I want to improve Linux's memory manager,
that's my kind of fun", and they just did it in a branch. Nobody told
them to, nobody held a big meeting and assigned this task to them -
they just did it because they wanted to.

> All patches, no matter which branch you send it to, goes through various
> stages. If it's irrelevant it gets dumped straight away. If it's deemed
> relevant then it's heavily vetted by various members of the team, usually
> argued about and modified, then added to that particular branch.

You're of course totally right here. People who are "doing what they
want" in their own branch will not want to accept bad quality patches
from people - and why should they? This branch is their "fun thing"
and they don't want it ruined. Because the maintainer feels like that
branch is "theirs", it makes for good code quality.

> It's also worth considering that whatever makes it into each release of the
> official kernel is then taken by distros and modified again, sometimes parts
> are removed, sometimes replaced and sometimes improved.

Exactly! People do what they want. Distro maintainers may have a
different focus than upstream (for example, Debian with their
packaging and legal policies), and so they are quite free to make
changes. This is good! Because distro maintainers are able to do what
they want, they are more happy doing it and their work is higher
quality. Competition with different distros gives them further
incentive to do good work.

> The chances of you "working on whatever you want" and getting it into the
> mainline linux tree are virtually zero.

This is true, but not really relevant to this discussion because
that's only due to Linux's greater size. The point is that when Linux
was the size of ReactOS, Linus Torvalds did not try to get a team to
agree on what to do - he just went ahead and did it. We can learn from
what Linus did when Linux was as small as we are.

> You really can't compare reactos to linux. Linux has a _vast_ number of
> developers and testers, we have about 10.

Sure you can! ReactOS and Linux are directly comparable because
they're both open source operating systems. Linux's management style
seems to work well and so we can certainly talk about whether it would
work for us and move the project forwards.

Pete.