On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Marten wrote:

> Ofcourse its free to do so. But I see people write there own patches and
> publish them. I think dat is a kind of waste to not combine al the
> patches and write with more people a better and completer firewall.

No no, you can't blame it all on the fact that we don't have CVS. All the
patches that have been sent to me so far and that made sense to integrate
in the official m0n0wall distribution have actually been integrated (after
verifying/correcting, if necessary). I don't think any good patch went to
waste there.

Besides, even if we had CVS, that wouldn't mean that anybody would be
getting commit access to it. It's not that I want to be egoistic, but I
want to be able to control and change all the code that goes into my
m0n0wall releases.

> if you say "or at least trying to" don't it mean that more only one can
> handle? Using a cvs makes it easy to develop. and it seems that at least
> a couple of people are willing to help :)

And there's nothing to stop them if they really want to. "at least trying
to" was referring to the fact that I can't possibly test each and every
feature in m0n0wall in every constellation - I rely on the users doing so
and reporting bugs they've found.

Just having a CVS doesn't mean that the code will develop itself, and what
difference does it make now if you send me some diffs or commit to a CVS
server...

Besides, I can't be bothered commiting all my changes to a CVS server (and
checking out files, too) all the time. I do m0n0wall development on three
different machines (an Apple PowerBook for all the PHP script editing, a
Windows 2000 machine with Dreamweaver (there you have it ;) for the webGUI
stuff, and some Compaq notebook with FreeBSD to build the images - plus a
file server to connect it all together).

> In time, I would to help to upgrade the os 5.1 for more flexibility and
> better wireless support.

Thanks for the offer, but that's another thing I'm religious about. I'd
have done the upgrade in a heartbeat, but I'm still totally unconvinced
about the speed and stability of 5.1 as compared to 4.8. Last time I
checked, it was still a lot slower (routing/filtering throughput), and
until that changes, we'll stay with 4.x. I know I'm being stubborn about
some things, but not without reason.

So come on people, don't hide yourselves behind that "I can't contribute
until there's a CVS server" stuff; you know you can if that's what you
really want, and if you don't, there's no need to account to me for it.

Finally, if there's a good reason to have a read-only CVS server where
commits consist simply of the complete set of PHP files when there's a new
release, I'd be willing to set that up as a convenience to those who don't
want to download the whole rootfs file to get the latest PHP files.

- Manuel