On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Bucky Katz wrote:

> > On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 11:38:48PM -0800, Bucky Katz wrote:
> >> 
> >> I have no problem with this. I am sad that I didn't know about it six
> >> months ago and spent time fixing M:N bugs.
> >> 
> >
> > I know the feeling but, quite honestly, I don't think anyone knew we
> > would be dumping M:N six months ago - we knew it had problems but at
> > the time there was not a person with the right combination of time,
> > skill and dedication to fix what was wrong.
> 
> "Six months ago" is an arbitrary time.  I sent email to Andrew as
> recently as a few days ago about patches I wanted to submit to M:N
> threading in pthreads and he didn't see fit to tell me that it was
> going away.
> 
> I don't know who you mean by "we", but whomever "we" is, they're not
> talking to the NetBSD developer community before deprecating large
> pieces of functionality.
> 
> We'll get past it. My team will throw away the work we did on M:N
> threads and support in libpthread.  We'll redo it to for 1:1 support.
> We'll worry on a regular basis which rug will be pulled out from under
> us next.
> 
> But we will say that we're sad and disappointed about what is a broken
> process, because the process is broken and we are disappointed.
> 
> Perhaps if "we" would stop being defensive about "six months" and "we"
> would actually talk to the developer community, "we" wouldn't be
> seeing email like this.

While I agree that discussion should be public, you should also consider 
that also. As you planned and actually started to work on this, you could 
have shared your plans (not necessarily code) to the appropriate tech-* 
list or here at current-users. Or you could mention your plans in a PR bug 
report.

Also it is important to note that private emails sent to NetBSD 
individuals may be overlooked, lost and/or responses delayed. Using a 
public list or PR to publicly note your plans may help. (Nevertheless, the 
official NetBSD should mention significant changes, but end-user 
developers don't have to of course.)

If you already did that, then that is good and you can ignore this advice 
:)

Also, as far as I see, this happens very rarely. Most technical changes 
are brought up/proposed on public lists.

  Jeremy C. Reed