[ros-dev] Roadmap I'm sticking to

[Jérôme Gardou]

You seem to forget that linux is just the kernel. They let the graphics 
side to X.org/Xfree, the shell to KDE/Gnome, the C library to GNU, 
etc... You can't really compare ReactOS and Linux!

Peter Millerchip wrote:
> 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.
>
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