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BSDForums Interviews Scott Long
Dan writes that BSDForums is featuring and interview with FreeBSD's Scott Long. Scott fills us in on some of the new things in FreeBSD 6.0 including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64, and wireless compatibility. In addition to specifics Scott also abstracts on the overall snapshot of BSD development with respect to OpenBSD, NetBSD and the ongoing debate between BSD vs. Linux.
Destination FreeBSD: Interview with Release Engineer Scott Long
This is a bsdforums.org first! BSDForums interviews FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long relating to various aspects of FreeBSD. Topics discussed include FreeBSD general issues, its academic roots, how FreeBSD compares to other BSDs - OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the ongoing debate on FreeBSD vs. Linux.
Scott gives us his perspective on the corporate adoption and popularity of FreeBSD. He brings us up to speed on FreeBSD 6.0, its new features and enhancements, including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64 and wireless compatibility. Scott also discusses FreeBSD 6.0's upgrade path and release timetable.
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Destination FreeBSD: Interview with Release Engineer Scott Long
BSDForums interviews FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long relating to various aspects of FreeBSD. Topics discussed include FreeBSD general issues, its academic roots, how FreeBSD compares to other BSDs - OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the ongoing debate on FreeBSD vs. Linux.
Scott gives us his perspective on the corporate adoption and popularity of FreeBSD. He also brings us up to speed on FreeBSD 6.0, its new features and enhancements, including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64 and wireless compatibility. Scott also discusses FreeBSD 6.0's upgrade path and release timetable.
1. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your first encounter with FreeBSD and what motivated you to use it ? How has FreeBSD evolved since the time you have been involved with it?
I'm 31 and live near Boulder, Colorado, with my wife, 2 kids, and 3 cats. Before I moved out here 6 years ago, I was in the US Navy for 6 years. My other day jobs have included a 4/5 year stint with Adaptec and my current job with SPARTA, Inc, doing work related to TrustedBSD and TrustedDarwin.
My first experience with BSD came when I discovered the Sun and HP labs at the University of Michigan in 1992. I decided that I absolutely had to replace my Windows 3.1 machine with Unix+X. That led to me discover 386BSD 0.1 and X386. So asking how it evolved in the time I've known it is like asking how a Model T evolved into a Mustang. Well, that's a bad analogy for those who don't like Ford. Anyways, it's come a long way =-) For a short while I toyed with the idea of using Linux, but the lack of a working network stack combined with the limitations of the minix filesystem made it pretty unattractive. I guess I was either oblivious to the legal battles with USL at the time, or I cared more about the technology and less about the politics.
In all, my involvement with FreeBSD has been very good for me in terms of exposing me to excellent engineering and extremely gifted people, as well as opening job opportunities for me.
2. Specifically what has been your role in Release Engineering relative to the entire release process, from a technical, authoritative and responsibility perspective?
I joined the release engineering team in Nov 2002. When I started, my only motivation was to increase the communication between the team and the rest of the developers. But, I quickly slipped in to doing the 5.0 release, and from there I took on the lead role in the team.
The job of the release engineering team is not only to do the mechanical work of producing a release, but also to ensure that the release is high quality. In order to do that, tools like code freezes, commit reviews and approvals, and bug status reports are used. So, a certain amount of authority and responsibility is implied there, but we also work very hard to make the process as open to others as possible, both inside and outside of the developer community.
And, this coordination and leadership of development is absolutely essential. Between having to coordinate the development and debugging activities of 220 developers and handle building and verifying releases for 5 hardware architectures, the old days of a single person freezing the tree for a few days and cuttin