Martin Mares <mj@ucw.cz> wrote on 2010/04/23 23:11:15:
Hello!
It seems to me that you are so afraid to break something for your precious IXPs that you rather drop user contributions than integrate them unless the changes has been proven correct. I, as a developer, has to do all the work, testing and "prove" that the change is "good". My view would be the work load should be shared by the community, this will help moving BIRD forward much quicker.
A necessary step in sharing your work with the community is to convince the community that the change you want to introduce is useful and/or interesting.
I did that, it is simpler and performs better or equal than the current code.
Why else should they spend any effort on helping to develop and test your change?
Actually, if you look inside the archive of this mailing list, you will be surprised that most people have had it very easy to get their feature
Lets hope this was the odd exception then.
accepted. Perhaps "this feature would be useful for my routers" is a sounder argument that "this will boost the performance, but I won't tell you how and why". Perhaps the problem does not lie in the BIRD community, but in your attitude...
I didn't expect so much pushback from what was a simple improvement, both performance wise and cleaner code. Instead there was don't touch working code even if it is ugly/worse and you must prove beyond doubts that it improves performance. Pretty impossible and not worth the amount of work I would have to put in just for such a small change.
Maybe you could take a look at the development process of some other projects which aim for producing high quality code, like for example the Linux kernel.
Been there, done that, still do that.