text stringlengths 0 1.8k |
|---|
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** \[27:46\] There are many mailing lists. In fact, either by topic, for instance, there are mailing lists around the graphics stack, around the Wi-Fi drivers, around network storage, a particular CPU architecture, and so on. And there are some mailing lists about topics such as the current deve... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Let me guess - these mailing lists are software that runs on the same FreeBSD servers as the Git repo? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah, they are hosted... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. Those must be some beefy machines, to run everything... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah, the infrastructure - initially, it was hosted in the Yahoo infrastructure, because some FreeBSD developers were employed by Yahoo; they offered that service. But now that Yahoo doesn't use FreeBSD anymore and the company is splitting the various services, the infrastructure moved to som... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So I understand how the community can talk to the FreeBSD developers... How can they participate in FreeBSD development? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** One way to find tasks is to look at the Bugzilla bug tracker. That's also one tool which is discussed, because people of my age are very happy with Bugzilla, but I'm sure people almost 20 years younger might find it quite archaic. \[laughs\] So yeah, that part is still being discussed and wil... |
So if you don't know what to do, that's one way to find work to do. Another one is just solve the problem that you hit every day if you are using FreeBSD for work, or at home. That's how I started, in fact. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And how do you submit the patches? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** You can send pull requests on GitHub. They should be taken care of by someone at some point. You can submit patches on mailing lists, you can submit patches on Bugzilla after opening an issue... There is no one specific channel to submit your work. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So this is a little bit of a tangent that we had for the last few minutes, because the question was "How does the FreeBSD release engineering look like?", so we covered that... So coming back to that topic, you had a very good description of how things work. I don't think you mentioned any timel... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah. It depends if it's a minor release or a major one. FreeBSD does not follow semantic versioning. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's interesting, because the version would make you think that it does, right? It's currently version 12 or 13, I can't remember... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah, both exist currently. \[unintelligible 00:31:28.23\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right, so both version 12 and 13. And you also have 12.1, 12.2... But those are not semantic versions. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** No, not really. It's close, but - how can I say...? Yeah, this is close to semantic versioning, but this is not documented as that. I mean, in FreeBSD we pay a lot of attention to breaking changes, as we have what we call POLA, Principle of Least Astonishment. It means that old changes which ... |
\[32:13\] So when you want to deprecate something or remove something, you have to announce that a long time before you want to do that. If possible, it's good if you can mitigate what you are about to change in a breaking way, so that the transition from one version to another major version - it must be as smooth as p... |
Back to the timeline, I would say that a major release -- between the beginning of the release cycle and the end we are talking 2-3 months, perhaps more if there are bugs that crept in and are difficult to track down. For minor releases, they are shorter, but we are still in the range of weeks, and perhaps months somet... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Okay. So now that we think about the FreeBSD release engineering as a whole, what can RabbitMQ learn from the FreeBSD release engineering? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** I like the fact that it's based on a fixed interval between major and minor releases, and the fact that the release cycle follows a calendar which is announced in advance to everyone involved, contributors and users. I think this is a great tool to improve the communication and the organizati... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. We have been thinking about this for a while, and we have been looking at -- well, FreeBSD is one example, but also other projects... And it does sound like a good idea. Obviously, between the idea and the implementation there's a whole ocean of things to go thro... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** For instance, there is the Darktable open source photo editing project. They are also publishing a calendar in advance, and because they provide translations of the software, they also have to take that into account into their release cycle, to give time to translators to provide their transl... |
Another one is the Mesa library, that you can use on Unix. It's a library providing a 3D implementation of OpenGL, for instance, and all the new standards in that area... And now it grew a lot \[unintelligible 00:35:21.18\] GPU drivers, for instance. So this is a large piece of code now, and what I like in their releas... |
\[35:59\] So they have someone, like FreeBSD, who is responsible to manage the release engineering. This time he's not higher or paid for that work, so it's on his free/spare time. They are trying various ways to -- that was a few years ago, so that probably settled since, but they wanted to try several things on what ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Do you know what I remember about this specific topic? During one of our RabbitMQ team summits -- by the way, RabbitMQ is a distributed team. As I mentioned, twice per year we used to meet in a single place. It used to be London. So we had like an on-site, which was an off-site for some -- but anyways... |
Then you told me about your interest in developing graphics drivers, which I thought was fascinating. How do you even do that? I was like, "Whoa... Really?" Little did I know that -- you know, also FreeBSD, I have to thank you for my FreeNAS server, how stable that is, and a couple of other things... So yeah, that is p... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Nice. That's good to know. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Yeah, that is good feedback for you. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yes. \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It wasn't 5.0, it was 9 and 10 -- actually, no, it was 11. I remember that one, 11; when I started really depending on it, it was great. That was a great few years of service. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Great. And yeah, you mentioned the graphics drivers - that's a nice topic around release engineering, because it's one area where it's difficult to find the right balance, in fact, because we want to ship obviously a stable operating system in the end, and the Mesa library also wants to be st... |
But that's an area where the hardware and the new models are put in the market at a high pace; the technology evolves a lot, and the GPU is a very complex beast. So on one side, you want to support the latest GPUs, but because if a user today buys a laptop, he will go for the latest shiny one. He won't choose the one r... |
\[40:15\] Yeah, it's very difficult to find the right balance between shipping often and shipping something stable. I don't think we've found the right balance in FreeBSD either. Now drivers are provided as packages; they are not in the core anymore, the source code of FreeBSD. That improved a lot, but it still has som... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think the more you dig into this and the more you work with this, you realize that it's not as straightforward, and everybody tries to make the best decisions they can given what they know. No one is trying to purposefully ship broken software. Sometimes it's really hard, and it looks like people do... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I think in certain contexts it's much easier to maybe use feature flags, or something similar, in that you're shipping the feature, but you're not enabling the feature. And this is a very important distinction to make. In some cases you can ship it, but not enable it, and that's okay. And then test it... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So yeah, countless times this has happened, and it will happen, so better be honest about it. |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** That's why it's important to communicate well to contributors and users. That's the responsibility of that release engineering; you know that it might not be perfect in the end, what you ship, but at least you tried to make sure that people are aware of what is fine and what might not be fine... |
**Break**: \[42:35\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** JSP, what did you work on before RabbitMQ? |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** I worked as an Erlang developer for a small French company. The company was providing a website aggregating ads, so that people could look for jobs, apartments, various objects they would like to buy. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[43:58\] Craigslist, or Gumtree? For the listeners... |
**Jean-Sébastien Pedron:** Yeah, something like that. And we wanted to provide some kind of social media features on top of that, so that people could easily interact between them. In that company I was an Erlang developer; we were two Erlang developers working on the server side of that service. We chose to take Yaws,... |
The website itself was developed in PHP and JavaScript, but we were not working on it; other developers were responsible for it. But those PHP files and static files were served by an Erlang VM. And what I liked about what we did is that we put some effort to make sure that the website was always running, even when we ... |
So if we had to upgrade the operating system, and especially the kernel which was Debian, obviously we would have to reboot the computer. But otherwise we wanted to leave the service running. And what was great is that we could in the end benefit from the hot code reloading feature of Erlang, this brilliant, awesome fe... |
We were very happy, because we could build Debian packages for our service. So we packaged the Yaws server, all our Erlang codebase and the website itself, so the PHP scripts, static resources, so JavaScript and CSS on images, and so on... So we packaged everything as Debian packages, and when we would apt-get update, ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** To me, that sounds like you're using Erlang the way it was meant to be used, and what you're telling me is that it works really well when you use it the way it was built. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.