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Why OpenBSD's Release Process Works
An anonymous reader writes "Twelve years ago OpenBSD developers started engineering a release process that has resulted in quality software being delivered on a consistent 6 month schedule — 25 times in a row, exactly on the date promised, and with no critical bugs. This on-time delivery process is very different from how corporations manage their product releases and much more in tune with how volunteer driven communities are supposed to function.
Theo de Raadt explains in this presentation how the OpenBSD release process is managed (video) and why it has been such a success."
but at least he is stubbornly consistent. Without it, openBSD would not exist in its current fine form.
That video can serve as a lesson to others on how to manage a project for an extended period of time and keep things consistent and predictable.
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What I got out of it was that the core developers, not some other group, do the testing. Rather than hand the task of quality control/testing to some other group just prior to release, all developers are held to a high level of participation in this regard. Theo and other developers use nightly builds in their day-to-day work and the entire system compiles most every night.
Two points:
1) they do not create a separate branch for a release. The release stays in TRUNK until it is released. This has the advantage that ALL developers are working towards a release. Introduction of features is slowed as a release approaches. He does not address the disadvantage of this system: that many developers sit around idle when their work is completed early during this phase.
2) Everyone tests. There is no test team. All developers test things before a release. He does not talk about agile and how everyone should be testing their own stuff anyways.
Point 1) was interesting. It works for them because they are volunteer based. They are not paying the salaries of the idle developers during the release phase. It would not work in a corporate environment because those people are to valuable to be underutilized.
NOTE: I did not listen to him talk... just read his slides.
Not that that would be a bad thing. The majority of people in the world are average, by definition. When a truly extraordinary person tells them what to do, and they shut up and do it, the collective ability of the group is far greater than the mere sum of its parts. If the extraordinary person happens to be a bit of a knob, that's irrelevant if they are all focused on the desired result and not their own silly little egos.
"Oh noes, he told me my code was stupid and wants me to to it again! Cry cry cry!"
If Theo tells you your code is stupid, then it is. End of story. Do it again. Yes, there are better ways to deal with people, but seriously, Theo gets knocked for his personality not because it's really that big a deal, but more because ordinary people are jealous of his enormous capacity.
Get over it people. Theo's good at what he does, OpenBSD could and would not exist without him, and the world is a better place for it.
I hate printers.
They have different philosophies. I really don't know where you're going with that post because isn't very accurate. You can't compare the "Linux Kernel" with OpenBSD's whole. A kernel is pretty much useless without a "userland." OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD are all operating systems. Linux, sorry to say, is not.
If you want to compare BSD versions to Linux versions, then you'd have to compare with (in no particular order): .... because I can't even keep track
-Gentoo
-Debian - Ubuntu - Xubuntu - Xandros - (how many more are there?)
-Slackware
-RedHat
-Ubuntu
So, you have a million confusion projects going on based on the code all, called "Linux". How many versions of "OpenBSD" are there out there? Umm, ONE. Sure, someone could go and make their own userland and such, but it cannot be called OpenBSD. So, before you go on a rant about how many times BSD has been forked, please get your facts straight.
Thanks,
Your post is off-topic from the video and the Slashdot article. This isn't a comparison about how Linux compares versus OpenBSD. The video, if you watch it, is about how the OpenBSD team manages their releases, meets their agreed upon release dates, and makes sure that each release is a quality product.
The points he discusses in his video revolve around conducting adequate testing of the product and having the developers use the to-be-released system rather than throwing something out as a release and moving on. His points about managing the release process are just as valid if they were applied to manufacturing and releasing cars, paper products, or skateboards as they are to operating systems.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
I disagree. The "forks" from original BSD weren't really forks. They were Berkeley giving up on it and letting others take over.
Most of the various BSD's are "forks" because they have different purposes. OpenBSD is security oriented, NetBSD is intended to run on vritually everything that has a CPU, FreeBSD was intended for more mainstram use.
The only real "schism" I can think of is when Matt Dillon broke off and formed DragonFly BSD. Everything else was pretty much some guys saying "I'm gonna go off and do this instead".
There may not be any real Linux "forks", but that's because Linus has tried very hard to make Linux "one size fits all", and that has resulted in its own set of problems (see the various scheduler wars, for instance.. they were bloody). There are also any number of "branches" in which different patches are applied to the mainline kernel for different purposes.
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No wacky and nutty GPL kooks.
But in return you get wacky and nutty BSD kooks.
No screaming diatribes over 'purity' of ideology.
You don't know who Theo de Raadt is?
No foaming at the mouth tantrums that someone is using your code and not kissing your fat ugly ass in reverence.
You definitely don't know Theo de Raadt.
The efforts the GNU crowd has done to keep open source developers locked into their compiler is sickening from anyone who likes to believe the open source world is some sort of technological marketplace of ideas compared to the Microsoft world.
Yeah, how dare they make a superior product, couldn't they have made GCC suck a bit more so the alternatives wouldn't look so bad?
Every BSD project I've followed or participated with has been a positive experience due to those types of licensed projects attracting engineers who just want to write good code and want their code to be available and free to everyone to make good use of it.
Same here, and the same goes for GPL'ed projects. In all cases, its the users (and the ocassional Slashdot troll) who make them look bad. Well, except for Theo's yearly foaming-at-the-mouth, but he's such a talented engineer we're ready to let that one pass.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
I could be wrong, but I think the primary reason they release so fast is because the OpenBSD team does not attempt to bundle all of existing open source software with their OS like say Debian is trying to do. In *BSD distros, there is the core OS that includes essentially only the operating system and some utilities, and then there is the ports collection. I believe a serious bug in some port package will not halt the release process of a BSD distribution, at least for non-essential ports.
It would be pointless to test prior to integration of all submitted components.
Stay away, stay faaaaaaar away from my code and applications.