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More Marcelo Tosatti
Frank writes: "There's an interview over at developerWorks Linux Zone with Linus's latest lieutenant Marcelo Tosatti. He talks about what it takes to be the maintainer of the Linux kernel, what his plans are for 2.4 and his favorite hack." If you missed it, you may also want to visit the answers Marcelo gave to Slashdot readers.
Comment on them.
Honey, I'm tied in a basement with a dog collar.
My dick is long enough but it's attached too low.
Everyone's moved on to bigger and better things (2.5), he's the guy left holding the bag.
Oh! But... if there's people in Europe with internet connections! Oh! And in Japan, too! And... what's that big area of land... Australia? :P
Perhaps... it is not in the middle of the night for them?
I'm just glad that Alan Cox doesn't have to look after it anymore. Now he can spend his time writing drivers and hacking away at the kernel source. As well as helping Redhat. He did good work maintaining 2.4.x but his talents could have been better spent elsewhere. Let's wish Marcello the best of luck.
Seriously: Linus is the king, and he's surrounded by a small contingency of advisors who filter what gets through to him. I'm not suggesting that these people aren't all very deserving, but it seems odd that nobody else is cranking out any sort of alternative. MS or Sun can't be considered serious competitors (not on the same page), and all the BSD's seem to have been pushed to the fringe. This leaves other Linux kernels, and there are none.
I suspect this is because you just can't compete with Linus -- after all, he is the man. Still, it seems to me that this leads to a lack of internal competition in a very important area of overall systems development, which can't be a Good Thing (tm); consider how much KDE and GNOME have benefitted from having each other to race against. The kernel, on the other hand, exists mainly on the preferences of a small number of people.
Of course, Linus historically has shown great insticts; he's only been really wrong once that I can remember. This might sound like a call for fragmentation, but I still can't help but think that being open is good, but being open and competing against someone else is even better.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Don't be stupid. If the internet exists outside of the US, tell me why they call it America On-Line?
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
Because America is not just the US
could be one reason.
Right, it's not driven by market forces but decisions are made by the kernel maintainers, but still... I'd say a lot of people use patches (especially driver stuff) before they make it into the kernel tree, so there's a certain amount of democratic feedback going on abour what patch might be the best for a task or a problem.
Or are we talking about the user's need to choose between different kernels?
Well, you can run roughly the same software on the FreeBSD kernel as you can on Linux. Gnome, Konqueror, Ghostscript... it's all there.
There aren't many commercial vendors selling BSD versions, but that doesn't matter so much when you can just get BSD and install the software you need yourself.
But if there was a significant need for alternative Linux kernels, I'm sure the competition would crop up faster than you can say "ego-boosting Linux fanatic". ;-)
This interview is as terse as the last one.
Good that he is the maintainer, he would not add
anything that is not required.
Oh come on, give him a break. So far the only mistake was the 2.4.17rc3/2.4.18 error. He's a human, we all make mistakes. He's doing a good job and things are stabilizing at a good rate. If you don't like it, submit a patch. Make a difference, don't talk shit. Or if you're not technically capable of that, how about writing up a Linux Kernel HOW-TO. Come up with a process, if it's good it may end up actually being used. He seems to be a guy pretty open to anything.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
If you look back, I think you'll see that RMS concieved the copyleft because a number of projects he was working on suddenly went commercial, leaving his out of the loop and separated from the hard work he'd been putting in.
Interesting, I've never heard this version of events before.
I thought RMS started Free Software after the issue with the printer driver.
<irony> A MSFT employee correcting someone with a 3-digit slashdot UID on the origin of copyleft </irony>
dW: How will you tell whether or not you're doing a good job?
Tosatti: When I stop receiving bug reports.
Score +4, Funny
Life sucks.
Marcelo's attitude is exactly the right one for this job. I wouldn't hire someone who think, that this is funny.
from http://kerneltrap.com/node.php?id=5
--
Q: How usable is the Hurd in its current version?
Neal Walfield: There has not been an official release of the Hurd since 1997. Most of the developers are concentrating on finishing the current feature set and working out important bugs.
With respect to usability, the Hurd works quite well as a desktop system, however, I would not yet recommend it to anyone as a server.
Q: How big is the team of people currently working on the Hurd?
Neal Walfield: There are currently about five people who work actively on the Hurd proper. As far as porting is concerned, there are about fifteen developers who participate regularly.
--
on the other hand, they integrated quite a lot of rather mature work from what has clearly been linux orientated development efforts, like filesystems, drivers and such - I wonder if RMS will call the final product GNU/Linux/HURD... :-)
dW: ...I read that you had been working at Conectiva for four years, and that you're only 18 now. How old were you when you started there?
Tosatti: I was 14.
Oh, that Slashdot interview! I didn't like it. I was doing a hundred interviews a day, so I was like, "Aagh, no more interviews!" and I answered their questions very fast, and people got angry because of that.
I guess the developerworks guys were smart enough to have the interview done at this time. Just imagine those "I'll work hard to maintain the kernel" answers they'll get if they didn't wait for a few months before they did the interview.
Don't quote me on this.
in event of rounding errors, the answer might be 13 or 15 ;-)
Don't quote me on this.
If you send in a Perl bug report and used the perlbug utility, nobody has to ask you configuration questions because they have the answer. If you didn't use it, then they just say to send 'perl -V'.
With OpenBSD they use dmesg in the same way as 'perl -V'.
Why with Linux would they have to go back and ask questions? Isn't configuration information (detected hardware etc) available somewhere? Why not just have a utility that sends it in attached to your bug report?
It seems to me there's plenty of kernel competition... If you read lkml you'll notice many kernel trees other than Linus's - Alan Cox's, Marcello's, Dave Jones's, AA's, etc... and the differences from the mainstream kernel can at times be as great as you could imagine while remaining compatible - different VM (AA/RVR), different scheduling (O(1), preempt), low latency, etc... or how about competition in journaling filesystems: reiserfs, ext3, xfs, jfs, etc.
A bit more outside of the mainstream you have things like the RT-Linux kernel or the L4 etc microkernel based Linux implementations, or for that matter even HURD as a Linux kernel alternative.
Finally, how many people even use Linus's kernel trees other than unstable version developers? The stable kernel trees leave Linus's hands before they ever become stable and actually usable, and the distributors like RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE never use his trees anyway.
yeah, but I bet its still a pain in the ass to install
-- null
1. kernel varsion (DO NOT FORGET ANY PATCHES and binary only drivers)
2. dmesg output
3 $LINUXDIR/.config
4 error message.
The insight here is just amazing. First question:
IBM - "What is 18 - 4?"
Tosatti - "14"
"Still, it seems to me that this leads to a lack of internal competition in a very important area of overall systems development, which can't be a Good Thing (tm);"
If you are trying to say that the current system
makes it unlikely that Linus can or will be displaced, yeah you are right.
However, I wouldn't go as far to say that Linus
doesn't have to deal with competition.
Maybe not to his position but certainly to his
decisions.
Read the kernel lists.
People challenge Linus all the time, and every
submitted patch or post is something that Linus
has to explain.
In short, he is constantly being challenged.
And sometimes in a wider venue than the mailing
list as the recent Bitkeeper brouha illustrates.
So, yes Linus's position is pretty secure but
he is in the thick of a Gladiator's arena of competition of ideas all the time.
Experience alone is not enough. Brains are not enough. An agreeable personality is not enough. A truly good QA man must have a love of QA which borders on the religious. That is the whole nature of QA. No detail is too small. It is right or it isn't. Marcelo exposed his lack of the QA right stuff when he poo-pooed his gross error, saying in effect that it didn't hurt the x86 release too much, only those other oddball architectures. Well excuse me, buster! It's time to clean out your desk; I'll have security show you to the door.
Sorry Marcelo, but you don't have the right stuff for QA release engineering. Not everone can play the NBA, and not everyone can be a QA engineer. You have to be born with the talent.
true true... :)
Hummmmm... just because the US is a country inside the American continent??? ;)
And from what I have heard, the hillbilly character in 'Three Kings' is not a one off, but regular army standard issue.
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