There has been a lot of noise on this list recently and I've been nudged
to try and calm things down a bit - not that I actually can, but I'll
give it a go.  Wish me luck, I'll need it :-)

I know David Miller and I can easily believe he rattled a few cages
over here.  He's a lot like I was about ten years ago, except that
he's a kernel hack, and ten years ago I was still trying to figure out
kernel Makefiles.  Ten years later, I'm still trying to figure out
kernel Makefiles...

David is a good guy with a lot of energy, a large talent, and an even
larger ego.  And he seems to be motivated from a desire "to do the right
thing" - I can't describe it better than that, except to say it's the
same sort of thing that was common around Sun amongst kernel hacks back
when Sun was producing SunOS 4.x.

David has pretty much done a kernel port of Linux to the SPARC platform
(at last count I think it was sun4c, sun4m including MP) by himself.
Others have helped, but I've been watching on the sidelines the whole
time and it sure seems like David did most of the work.

David is very young, 21, I think.  The best David story I have is this:
he and I were discussing the effects of page coloring on different
architectures (you all know this but, page coloring is what the OS does
to make sure that all your pages map to different locations in the level
2 cache).  Anyway, we're yacking away, thinking about how to add this
to Linux, and finally David says "yo, Larry, I can't talk about this
anymore, I have to go take my intro to data structures final".  Think
about that a bit when you read a David flame, and cut him a little 
slack.

I've talked with David offline, and his intent in saying anything
over here was simply to get the *BSD folks to take a look at his work.
He wants people to see how he did and either tell him it's busted and
it would be better if he had done XYZ, or tell him it's neat and could
he please help someone with a problem they are having with their port.

I'd like to point out that everyone needs strokes for their work.
I think somebody on this list sort of implied that that was immature.
Maybe it is, but I don't think anyone here would be complaining if I
showed up, looked at their work, and told them what a great job it was.

I think David was fishing for a few strokes, in addition to trying to help
out with the NetBSD port.  He intended no offense to anyone on this list.
It wouldn't hurt you to acknowledge that he has done some substantial
work, I know that I certainly hadn't done a kernel port by age 21 so
I'm quite impressed with David's talent and energy (impressed enough
that I got some SGI folks interested and we hired him for the summer).
Anyway, if this was a mutal admiration exchange instead of a pissing
contest, I think you'd see a free flow of ideas that would help both
sides to make their stuff better, rather than this wasted energy.

Bottom line: David is a good guy, he's a little quick with his mouth,
but don't hold that against him - he's trying to help you.  Remember
that, he's trying to help you.  He's told me that over and over, all
he was trying to do was to offer you help with your port.  Chant that
to yourself as you compose your replies :-)

Larry "I wish we were fighting u$oft instead" McVoy