A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

A bizarre feature of some of the developer mailing lists and Usenet groups is the absolutely hateful vicious toxic nature of them.

OP's site bikeshed.org (http://bikeshed.org/) has some nice proposed features for software that posts to large audiences.

     +------------------------------------------------------------+
      | Your email is about to be sent to several hundred thousand |
      | people, who will have to spend at least 10 seconds reading |
      | it before they can decide if it is interesting.  At least  |
      | two man-weeks will be spent reading your email.  Many of   |
      | the recipients will have to pay to download your email.    |
      |								   |
      | Are you absolutely sure that your email is of sufficient   |
      | importance to bother all these people ?                    |
      |								   |
      |                  [YES]  [REVISE]  [CANCEL]                 |
      +------------------------------------------------------------+

      +------------------------------------------------------------+
      |	Warning:  You have not read all emails in this thread yet. |
      |	Somebody else may already have said what you are about to  |
      |	say in your reply.  Please read the entire thread before   |
      |	replying to any email in it.                               |
      |								   |
      |			     [CANCEL]                              |
      +------------------------------------------------------------+

Perhaps any forum software needs these, as well as buttons saying [really post this?] [save this angry version locally, and give you time to write a calmer version] etc.

An example:

libkse was an attempt to implement M:N thread scheduling. This is something that can, in theory, provide significant benefits over 1:1 thread scheduling, but in practice, is extremely complicated to implement and has fallen out of favor across the board: Solaris abandoned the approach in Solaris 9, and FreeBSD abandoned it in (IIRC) FreeBSD 7.

Concurrent to libkse, libthr was developed by David Xu, and was also included in the FreeBSD base system. It implemented 1:1 threading, is far simpler than libkse, and has replaced libkse as the default threading library.

I would argue that in this case, FreeBSD's cathedral model failed; M:N threading ideally would have never been attempted, and it was wasteful to attempt to implement two distinct threading libraries. However, considerable thought and expertise went into the work, and the work (and decisions around it) were not made flippantly or taken lightly.

It was simple a case where despite best intentions and best effort, the wrong choice was made. At the same time, in what some might call "bazaar-like", David Xu maintained libthr as an alternative. It remained there, ready for adoption as the default threading library, until such time as it became apparent that M:N via libkse was a dead-end.

This was a mistake, but no entity is perfect, and the success rate of FreeBSD's considered decision-making remains statistically high. In this case where something never worked, it was replaced with something equally well-considered and far more successful.

Moreover, compared to Linux's gross missteps with their threading implementations (including such gems as setuid() being thread-local as an implementation side-effect), libkse was a minor fender-bender.

While I (a younger developer) may not have much experience in cathedrals, bazaars, or what have you. I've noticed one major issue come up again and again in this discussion here on HN: no-one seems to be able to agree on what these terms even mean and everyone is talking past one another. I've seen arguments using Office, Windows, iOS, and OSX as examples of Cathedrals, and I've seen just as many using them as examples of Bazaars.

It's very difficult to learn when everyone is just ranting.

I was intimately involved in those discussions and decisions.

There seems to be some underlying assumptions of omniperfection hung of the "cathedral" meme in these parts. That is simply unfounded in both theory and practice.

Second, cathedral vs. bazaar is not really about governance, but about architecture, and they are two separate power-structures, although most organizations, including FreeBSD, mingle them, to their own disadvantage.

We can argue if attempting M:N was a wise or a factually based decision, but that has nothing to do with cathedral vs. bazaar, certainly not in this particular case: What happened was that M:N came first and that was that.

Only once it clearly transpired that it could not sustain its promises in practice (partly because every thread programmer assumed 1:1) did the actual decision making aparatus of FreeBSD kick into gear.

In Linux, (which is much more cathedral than FreeBSD) or OpenBSD (at the time even more so), that decision would probably have been executed practically instantly, but in FreeBSD which is mostly consensus driven, it took some time (and angry words etc.)

But overall the libkse vs. libthr saga has almost nothing to do with cathedral vs. bazaar, because architecture was not the driving force at any time during that saga.

Thanks for weighing in. I worry about going out on a limb describing FreeBSD in a thread you're a part of. While I'd never assume omniperfection, I expect top-down enforced careful consideration to more often produce correct decisions.

That said, given your response, I think perhaps still don't understand the meaning behind your cathedral/bazaar dichotomy.