[OpenAFS] Re: [OpenAFS-devel] 1.6 and post-1.6 OpenAFS branch management and schedule

[Russ Allbery]

"Christopher D. Clausen" <cclausen@acm.org> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:

>> The code is dire verging on unsupportable and really needs to be
>> rewritten.

> If the code is so bad, why was it accepted in the first place?

Because we didn't have the code review mechanism that we have now, the
coding standards that we have now, or the project goals that we have now.
It wouldn't be accepted in its current form today, but January of 2003 was
a different world for how OpenAFS development is done.

Take a look at 8ab7a909371f47ddb4f2adc8104b64dfc4c610bd.  There's
absolutely no way that we'd apply a patch like that now, for a whole bunch
of reasons.  It introduces random new features unrelated to supergroups
(pts interactive), it abuses #define, it introduces aliasing problems and
data structure reinterpretation, it's a giant mess of #ifdefs, etc.

> This seems to be a completely different issue than supporting a specific
> feature.  You cannot penalize people who are using what appeared to be a
> supported feature because someone allowed said bad code in and now it
> cannot be maintained.

Which was, in fact, exactly my point when I said that I can't turn it off
for the Debian packages.  That doesn't imply we should turn it on by
default for everyone else when it's never been on by default for most
builds.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>