On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 12:07:57AM +0000, max porter wrote: > Hi, > > Sorry for resending this, apparently the list didn't like my primary email > address and the message got encoded. Resending to max it easier for everyone. > > I don't use OpenBSD but a friend asked for help since they do. They saw a > patch for Ansible which will help them manage their systems from other OS, > but it wasn't in Ansible itself. They told me they asked the maintainer (who > has an openbsd.org email) about it and got the following quote after some > discussion (if there is somewhere they should forward the original I can pass > it along): > > "If somebody starts telling me that I must do something because they just > decided so, I don't care if is it bad education, stupidity or mental illness. > " >
This is pretty much a basic tenet of the OpenBSD community. Each of us does what we do only because we choose to do it for our own purposes. At first glance, this may seem harsh. Yet OpenBSD has a type of group of individuals who are furthering their own desires, for their own sake. Hmm. Terrible! Yet it has produced perhaps the most secure OS, extremely clean code which is constantly examined for any possible defect and is a complete unitary system, kernel, userland, and ports together at any one moment. I'm working on bringing in LedgerSMB. Not because anyone asked me to, but because I have chosen to. I have received help (thank you!), but this is, at the moment, my project. I like doing this. At some point I will finish and be happy. In a sense, this is a philosophy different than many other projects. Each of us, as individuals, chooses what to do or not. Doing work for the benefit of others is not a problem at all, but not required. I really like this. To me, this is proper individual freedom, which does indeed produce something of great value without demanding anything in return. As someone inside the LedgerSMB project told me, "it's OK if my work takes a long time, since we aren't getting paid for it anyway." One problem is that everything done takes time. Sometimes weeks or years. Patches, ports, questions, etcetera pretty much require someone else to respond in some way. As the mailing lists roll along, things often get overlooked and need to be resent with a ping. Not everything gets done. > But it looks like the policy here > https://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/guide.html#PortsPolicy suggests this patch > should have been shared, but was not. I went ahead and opened a PR > (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/72937) and pinged the maintainer for > their feedback in case I missed something. > > While doing my patch I found https://github.com/ansible/ansible/pull/65112 > from the past which seems to be another patch not submitted but which was > actually accepted. > > Since I am not an OpenBSD user I was curious if that policy item is still > valid, or if it is pending amendment for more specific criteria for when > patches should be shared with projects? When patches are shared, or not, > where does this end up getting documented? > > For instance, in Fedora there is a comment in the spec file explaining why a > patch is needed, where it was submitted, and why it was not included if > applicable. Ref: > https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/#_patch_guidelines OpenBSD has a different system for accepting outside software that works pretty well. Things are tested and placed in just the right spots. That extra work especially pays off when updates are needed, since the process is very strict. OpenBSD frequently needs special patches to deal with the differences between other OS's. Commits can be seen at ports-chan...@openbsd.org (don't send mail there, please) Questions and discussion happen at ports@openbsd.org OpenBSD strongly expects users and contributors to work hard (in a good way) to learn from the source code and to read the excellent man pages. The man pages are deliberately kept complete but short. Please, feel free to ask any questions. Also, if this email sounds cranky, it's not meant to be. And, if you want to, put OpenBSD on a flash drive and give it a run. You might want to use it along side with your regular OS. Years ago, I tried a variety of Linux distributions, but I wasn't really happy with any of them. I saw a mention of OpenBSD and that was that! Chris Bennett
