Re: [9fans] design issues in operating systems

[Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>]

On Tue, 4 Dec 2001, Dan Cross wrote:

> In article <Pine.GSO.4.21.0112031647410.17686-100000@binet.math.psu.edu> you write:
> >Hmm...  I doubt that "for everyone to contribute" is a good thing,
> >but seeing is a different story...
>
> Nonsense.  Everyong is free to contribute.  But, contribution is not
> synonymous with acceptance.

<shrug> well, provided that your .procmailrc is well-maintained - sure.
You _really_ don't want to see the... contributions from Qlogics SCSI
folks.  Or Intel folks who do NIC drivers.  There are less harmful ways
to take a second look at your last meal...

> The labs might run into another problem if development source is there
> for all to pick at.  Surely they will receive a ton of patches for things
> that they're already aware of, have already fixed but not synced to the
> outside fileserver, or are still experimental and changing rapidly.  The
> cost in terms of time and resources to sift through what comes in from
> the outside could be non-trivial.

_That_ is easy to deal with -
	/* XXX: Yes, I know.  It's crap.  Working on that. */
is usually enough for stuff that stays for a week or so and for very
recent breakage you have not too may places you've just touched, so
sorting is not a big deal...