When will D1 be finished?

[Brad Roberts]

On Wed, 13 May 2009, Georg Wrede wrote:

> As a precedent, I've always wondered how Linus Torvalds (of Linxu fame) made
> the transition from about 5 guys as helpers to 1000 guys, seeming to have *no*
> problem at all, expanding in less than a few months.
> 
> I've always thought that he must've been lucky as hell, but then I realise
> that that's just lazy thinking, after the fact. The other explanation worries
> the daylights out of me: maybe he simply was a superior being. Meaning that,
> first of all, just reading Tanenbaum, he understood, and perceived as trivial,
> stuff that sent everybody else screaming to the woods. *And*, second, that
> creating, constantly modifying, and expanding, a hierarchy of aides, was no
> bigger a thing for him, than programming a balanced red-black tree.
> 
> Actually, we're luckier than Linus, because we've already got Andrei, and Don
> ((and a few others, apologies for not mentioning here!!!)), (in addition to
> Walter, of course), but the rest of the "forest management" has been, ehh,
> haphazard, at the most, so far.

This one is relatively easy to answer.  He's still got just a handfull of 
guys.  THEY fan out to the multitudes and aggregate changes that he pulls 
in.  There's a very high degree of trust between Linus and the next tier 
of developers.  He does some level of spot checking, primarily in core 
areas and areas known to be problems, but by and large, there's a lot of 
code that's just directly funnelled through the others that own various 
subsystems.

Similarly, asside from the odd code review here and there, Andrei's 
changes to Phobos are fully under his control.

We're growing in baby steps, but there's a lot of 'em left. :)

Later,
Brad