Forgive me, but I had to put in my $0.02 on this subject.

>1) He is explicitly *not* excluded from the `development group'.  The
>way most people contribute to the project is by sending changes to the
>`maintainer' of the code they've worked on, or submitting them with
>`send-pr', and he's welcome to do the same.

I think most people would agree that Theo's work on the sparc port is much
more extensive than most contributers.  I also believe there is other people
not in core who are not port-masters that have access to the CVS tree directly
(if I'm wrong on this point, please correct me).  So since Theo seems to
be a major contributor, I think there is a good reason and precedent for him
to also have CVS access.

I guess I have a couple of points:

- I can understand the frustration of someone who used to have direct access
  to a source tree, and now has to go through an intermediary (please don't
  interpret this as a slight against core or the port masters).

- If whatever transpired didn't involve access to the CVS tree, then I don't
  see a reason why he shouldn't have access (since he did before).  But since
  I don't know what happened, then it's hard to see this from somebody else's
  point of view.  From the little I've heard about what happened, it didn't
  involve anything like that, but like I said -- I can't really tell from here
  (but I understand about keeping this sort of stuff confidential -- if that
  had been done back during the Net/Free split, it might have prevented all
  the nasty stuff that transpired then).

- There's a large perception that the BSD camps are full of in-fighting; it's
  rather unfortunate that this has some basis in fact.  It's in the general
  interest of everybody that we all should try to get along.

- It would really suck if Larry McVoy convinced Theo to go work on Linux (no
  offense intended toward Larry).

Anyway, I've said my peace.

--Ken