Rimvydas Jasinskas posted an extended description of what’s happening with dports. There’s a significant xorg reformatting coming in ports, which is going to be absorbed into dports, but it may take some time. There’s also an odd loss of commit rights for John Marino, who commits (frequently!) to both DragonFly and FreeBSD. (His followup) This all translates to some upcoming transition time for dports to accommodate these changes.
Note that if you are using dports binaries, especially on DragonFly 4.6 release, this won’t really affect you; the way dports is set up, binary sets always work. It is interesting to hear about future work, in any case.
Unfortunately, Marino wasn’t removed for work quality reasons. r433827 is pretty clear, if vague:
> Their behaviour towards their fellow contributors has repeatedly fallen short
> of what the Project expects of its members. They were given multiple warnings
> that their interactions with other contributors needed to improve and
> unfortunately they did not.
Core has expressed that they intend to send a follow-up email with more detail as soon as possible.
Argh. “Core” is a nicely generalized term that indicates a group of people without making any one person responsible. I don’t know who Core is, or where they are expressing this, nor is there any way to interact with this process other than read this planned email, like it was a press release.
I know Core is a specific group of people, but it’s not listed on the FreeBSD website. (search for “core” and see what you get) The most recent newsletter mentions Core actions, but not who it is.
I realize these are generalized complaints I’m making, but they are still valid. This keeps happening; FreeBSD runs into a contentious issue, a decision eventually gets made, but the debate and thought process stays hidden and the fix for that is always a later statement or explanation. I think this is fundamentally the wrong approach for a volunteer-driven organization to take.
I’m not even thinking about this specific event with marino in this case; I know he’s acerbic and opinionated, but he’s also committed to BSD and extremely motivated, and it is counterproductive to reject the most active members of a community.
What I’m saying here, I guess, is that the communication methods for FreeBSD – as a project – I think cause problems at the same time they are trying to fix them, and changing that cultural approach is very hard but also worthwhile.
FreeBSD Core Team:
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2016-July/001732.html
This seems like the right time to point out that I started the Digest in part because I was frustrated by how important BSD information was hidden away in mailing list archives.
I complete agree Justin. I’m not necessarily going to say the decision was wrong, it may or may not be. I continue to have great respect for John Marino’s work either way.
What bothers me is that they make a public statement in a commit log but act in complete secrecy in every other respect. Some transparency might give developers and users some confidence.
Changing topics. Looks like FreeBSD fired a core developer.
Reminds me what happened to Dillon a decade ago.
Still unclear what happened to John
https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/5u7ezi/prominent_freebsd_developer_john_marino_fired_no/
You aren’t changing topics – that’s the same thing referenced in the linked post.
Hilariously, I can find a list of core alumni on the FreeBSD website, but not the current core! https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/contrib-corealumni.html
It doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2014 — it lists people who are on the core as per the 2016 mail, and omits people who are not on the 2016 mail. But they have updated the “development team alumni” page (next page) very rapidly to show marino as a “former developer”.
You can find the current core team member list at : https://www.freebsd.org/administration.html#t-core.
Ports returning to John:
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/59705/page-2#post-343080
Crest – I was able to find it by going to a section other than Introduction in the About area, clicking one of those links, then picking Administration from the side menu, then clicking the Core Team intra-page link, which is annoying but I guess possible.
“core team” searches find it, but “core” does not, which is really just a quirk of searching rather than anything else. Eh, it does not matter other than to say I’d like it to be more visible.
Re: Marino getting his ports back
https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/59705/page-2#post-343080
>>”In other words, if they had asked me directly if I wanted them back, I would have said “no, leave them without a maintainer”.
========
Question: can someone provide a little more context of what’s going on?
From how I read this, I sounds like Marino account was suspended.
He claims publically he doesn’t know why.
Then his account is re-activated.
And then Marino says if he’d be asked if he wanted to have is account re-activated if would have said “no”.
That doesn’t make any sense to me. I must be missing something.
Can someone clarify.
@Anonymous
JM has lost his commit rights to the FreeBSD ports tree, see http://www.freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd-ports/r433827
Then some other freebsd port commited removed him from all the ports where he was MAINTAINER (you can be a ports maintainer without having commit rights) http://www.freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd-ports/r433856
But this was rolled back with http://www.freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd-ports/r434195
Anyway, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth, was JM kicked because he fixed too many DFly problems (i.e. commiting fixes without asking the maintainer first?)