> we desperately need people running, testing and debugging Coda NOW!

I have the perception that coda is hard to build and install.
Actually, I have the perception that it's a complete and total
gelatinous mess, which every so often gets scraped up out of students'
home directories with a beat-up spoon, nailed to a pallet, and shipped
to testers, dripping bits all the way.  Yum yum yum!  (See, I can
write like Bob when I want to.)

If you improve the release engineering so that I can get coda running
with one ftp, one tar, one configure, one make, and one shell script
to start the daemons -- I will do so!  Simple as that.  And so will a
lot of other people, I think.

Fixing bugs in your release process and making things easy and
attractive for your bazaarettes may be the best place to put your
coding efforts right now.  Given the choice between a one-command
build and a six month uptime, the one command build will get me to
play with it, and the six month uptime will not.

> Hopefully you can write some testing software for us

If you can deliver the filesystem in a nice package, I'll be happy to
break it for you.  Please supply two scripts: One script that resets
all data bits to a known good state by stopping all the daemons,
remaking the filesystem, and restarting the daemons.  And a second
script that packages up as many facts about a failure instance as
practical given bandwidth, and ships it to you as a bug report.  I'll
supply failure instances and the test programs that cause them.

> we are not a Cathedral we want to be a Bazaar

>From what little I see on the announcement list, you're quite firmly a
Cathedral.  This is not from an autocratic style, but simply because
you're the only people that understand the design and the internals
well enough to do anything.  First attract a bunch of bug reporters
with an easy-to-install product.  Then some of them will slowly wade
into the code, after they've absorbed its behavior from their bug
reporting.


League for Programming Freedom (LPF) ftp://ftp.uu.net/doc/lpf/patents.text
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Bartholomew - bb_at_wv.com - www.wv.com - Working Version, Cambridge, MA