Message-ID:	<3767EA1E.47E8ED60@pallen.dabsol.co.uk>
Date:	Wed, 16 Jun 1999 19:17:02 +0100
From:	Peter Allen <P DOT Allen AT pallen DOT dabsol DOT co DOT uk>
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To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Hello World and File size
References:	<Pine DOT SUN DOT 3 DOT 91 DOT 990616103657 DOT 16595B AT is>
Reply-To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 15 Jun 1999, Peter Allen wrote:
> 
> > I though the whole point of "The cathederal
> > and the bazaar" was that linux was written in a bazaar style environment
> > rather than a cathederal.
> 
> AFAIK, there's no bazaar as far as Linux kernel development is
> concerned.  Applications and other packages is a different matter.

I don't know about recent releases, but I know in "the early days" 
there was an active population of about 1000 people submitting patches,
which were dealt with by a higher-archial team of people, each with
there own specialized subject, until it got to people like Alan Cox
and Linus himself, who controlled what went in and what didn't. 
(As well as doing coding themselves, of course.)

> > One point I will make about DJGPPs development (totally unrelated)
> > is that it is much more isolated from the users than linux's
> 
> This is simply not true.  There's no isolation whatsoever between
> DJGPP users and the DJGPP development team.  All those who actively
> participate in DJGPP devlopment read this group regularly, answer
> questions and explain the internal operation of the software.  And any
> person who wishes to be involved in the development can subscribe to
> the developers' mailing list (if she or he is ready to read some
> boring technical discussions about subtle issues ;-).  Also,
> pre-releases of many packages and libraries are regularly announced
> here, for those who want the latest and hottest stuff.

It wasn't a complaint, but an observation.  I think in a lot of cases
it is a good thing, especially for something like DJGPP.
Also, what I meant with the development of DJGPP is the devel itself,
not the developers, who very much participate in this list.

> > IMHO because DJGPP is not going under *intensive* development i.e. like
> > something like wine is
> 
> I don't know on what facts do you base this observation.  As far as
> I'm concerned, the last 5 months was as full with ``intensive'' DJGPP
> development as I can possibly bear, and I know that several others did
> a tremendous amount of work as well, now and before.

You misunderstand me on this one, want I meant was because DJGPP had
got stable versions with virtually everything working as it should,
there are not new library releases every day or two, which is how
*big* library bugs get in.  With something like Wine, users will
have to download new versions very regulary to get some 
previously unimplemented api feature, so most people use unstable
versions.

> > library bugs from shared librarys would not be huge problems.
> 
> IMHO, library bugs are always a huge problem.  A case in point is the
> bug in v2.02 that disables profiling.  For any serious developer, this
> is a grave problem.

Agreed, although as DJGPP is a mature project, there will be far fewer
of them than programs that haven't reached version 1.0.

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