4 ms·

I wonder if keeping CVS is not one of the smartest things the OpenBSD project does now. I'm being somewhat facetious but hear me out. Workflow is as much abou

by kev009 12y ago

I wonder if keeping CVS is not one of the smartest things the OpenBSD project does now. I'm being somewhat facetious but hear me out. Workflow is as much about people and process as it is about tools. The tools simply serve the people and processes. This is a project that has consistently hit high quality releases, on a predetermined schedule, for coming up on two decades. That is unprecedented. I can't think of anything even remotely similar. Version control is a tool for integrating change and managing releases. They are arguably one of the best projects at doing it. See the silliness of the "CVS?!" non sequitur yet? So for people to drive by, who are statistically more likely part of the problems in the software industry, and critique the OpenBSD development process.. is at best cute and worst delusional. Inadvertently(?) it functions as a litmus test.. if you care so much about this, you aren't really who we want to work with anyway, similar to the candidate fixated on his title in http://dtrace.org/blogs/eschrock/2012/08/14/engineer-anti-patterns/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/eschrock/2012/08/14/engineer-anti-pa...

zirkonit 12y ago
Makes sense, thanks for the perspective.
thaumaturgy 12y ago
Yep. The OpenBSD devs seem to be fully conscious of this too. Like, when they first announced their fork of OpenSSL, and decided to use comic sans for the font. (http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/23orq0/libressl_openbsds_fork_from_openssl/ http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/23orq0/libressl_open... -- "This page is scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters.") As expected, that got a bunch of people talking about comic sans, instead of OpenSSL, and acted as a pretty good filter for serious programmers. ...which apparently I've also just fallen on the wrong side of. Darn.
dscrd 12y ago
>I wonder if keeping CVS is not one of the smartest things the OpenBSD project does now. Given that OpenBSD is supposed to be a security-oriented OS, it's slightly weird that they are using a version control system that does not guarantee that what you put in the repo actually stays there, unchanged. Git guarantees that. > They are arguably one of the best projects at doing it. What makes you think that?
- kev009 12y ago
  1) Repo security is a hard proposition. Using git with an ostensibly(SHA-1) immutable history doesn't imply security. git repo integrity is cool, and I'll just point to interesting discussion of attacks and mitigation in http://mikegerwitz.com/papers/git-horror-story http://mikegerwitz.com/papers/git-horror-story. I'll end my debating with the fact that there is room for improvement. 2) Releasing on time, of high quality, for nearly two decades. Development process.. not that it is some ultimate code or product.

by kev009 12y ago

zirkonit 12y ago

Makes sense, thanks for the perspective.

thaumaturgy 12y ago

Yep. The OpenBSD devs seem to be fully conscious of this too. Like, when they first announced their fork of OpenSSL, and decided to use comic sans for the font. (http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/23orq0/libressl_openbsds_fork_from_openssl/ http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/23orq0/libressl_open... -- "This page is scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters.") As expected, that got a bunch of people talking about comic sans, instead of OpenSSL, and acted as a pretty good filter for serious programmers. ...which apparently I've also just fallen on the wrong side of. Darn.

dscrd 12y ago

>I wonder if keeping CVS is not one of the smartest things the OpenBSD project does now. Given that OpenBSD is supposed to be a security-oriented OS, it's slightly weird that they are using a version control system that does not guarantee that what you put in the repo actually stays there, unchanged. Git guarantees that. > They are arguably one of the best projects at doing it. What makes you think that?

kev009 12y ago
1) Repo security is a hard proposition. Using git with an ostensibly(SHA-1) immutable history doesn't imply security. git repo integrity is cool, and I'll just point to interesting discussion of attacks and mitigation in http://mikegerwitz.com/papers/git-horror-story http://mikegerwitz.com/papers/git-horror-story. I'll end my debating with the fact that there is room for improvement. 2) Releasing on time, of high quality, for nearly two decades. Development process.. not that it is some ultimate code or product.