On Tue, Jan 28, 2025 at 11:23 AM Sebastien Lorquet <sebast...@lorquet.fr>
wrote:
my trust in nuttx is now hard to maintain.
Every day a DELUGE of commits (from xiaomi, this is a fact) is added to
the repository.
I am struggling to understand what happens in this project.
so many fixes are pushed, how is that even possible? this is a quicksand
project!
Sebastien, I feel your pain. Not necessarily with NuttX as this is my
"safe island". But with all Open-Source in general. This is the result
of enforced-changes ideology introduced ~30 years ago by Microsoft
that surrounds us even in daily non-computer life. I don't even
mention commercial products that get constantly more expensive and
clearly have no basic QA process and break ~6 month after purchase. I
lost trust in big brands long ago.
Also, how are such commits (not from xiaomi!) allowed? No description
except "uf2" ? Where is the adult in charge?
We do what we can, updated documentation and requirements, added
helper bots with feedback, etc, and require sensible descriptions. I
even update some PR descriptions by hand. Still it is git log that
contains the history true.
There is only few people that review the code. If you could help us
that would help a lot! You may not use GH for projects just to help us
in review..
I am announcing that after that many years my company has started to
develop a minimal rtos to replace our usage of nuttx, because it is just
not stable enough to be usable for stable long term projects.
There are too many changes, we are loosing money every time we need an
update. there is no way to maintain the use of a nuttx custom board and
project over several years.
Having control of our code will be a better investment. That will
obviously be closed source. Which is, after all, a better way of control
on our products.
I am facing the same situation for some long years and it gets worse
and worse :-( Either use something that is advertised to work quickly
but then you are tied to constant moving target and maintenance
nightmare and if you want to change one simple thing it takes more
time than would take me to write everything myself. On the other hand
it is impossible to write everything on your own. I wrote from scratch
the LibSWD ~15 years ago to be able to debug.. and it turns out today
that I can do much more today with a commercial probe :-( All previous
project made with fancy pancy RTOS and frameworks are now in trash.
Solutions like Linux and FreeRTOS also change API every release that
causes maintenance nightmare. I use FreeBSD as OS but it also has its
own problems, more changes are introduced with every release, drivers
adopted to be compatible by so called "Linux standard" are
self-incompatible nightmare.
I am working with niche solutions but the changes come constantly from
other places and that impacts even those niche solutions. You will
have the same problem with your own RTOS as I face them in my own
projects :-(
This comes mainly from enforced changes ideologies that are advertised
as "innovation" by people with zero old-school coherent simple and
effective engineering knowledge.. and maybe from exponential growth
that is objectively hard to cope without full time team and that
requires funding we have and no one really cases about funding
Open-Source just taking the results for free.
No amount of my involvement in the github triage is going to help, the
case is desperate. I just have no time, no energy, no motivation, no
spoons left to deal with this. it's a deluge of commits, let it be, but
without me.
Yes, but what was the last time you helped us in review? This is our
best-effort and all brainz matter! Help us to make things good. I
always valued your constructive criticism on the mailing list.. it
would be more than welcome and appreciated on GH too. But you are not
on GH so how can you help? I also dont like Microsoft took over
GitHub, I also dont like their fake support for Open-Source while its
clearly an exploitation, I also dont like we need to ask for over 5
years for FreeBSD CI runners and it is rejected every time. I also use
other platforms to host projects, but this is a common place, a tool.
the warning from the apache foundation that you use too many ci credits
should have been a warning to slow down and reflect on the project
direction. nothing has happened except making it even faster.
Not really. I would expect support from Apache in tuning stuff, maybe
adapting resources to scale of the project (tiny projects have the
same amount of resources as big projects). We updated and optimized
the CI process as a result. We are working on more independent
solutions for both code hosting, build automation, and runtime
testing. But this is not a weekend work for few people in a free time.
I agree there is a problem. But we do what we can to fix it. All
brainz matter. Help us make things good.
I will also discourage people to use this project, I cannot in good
conscience recommend it to anyone, it would be a trap.
Just as any other Open-Source project nowadays unfortunately. I dont
even mention closed source SDKs that change on monthly or weekly basis
and you have nothing to say just to chase the rabbit. I feel your pain
because I face the same problems for a long time. There is however a
difference in enforcing changes just to make things "modern" or adding
modern stuff in best-effort incremental way respecting the old-school
engineering rules that I think we follow here in NuttX. Problems
happen everywhere. The problem is what you do with the problem.
Creating your own RTOS may be a solution but you will eventually face
the same problems. In the long term it may cost you even more than
just helping us from time to time to make things right.
goodbye.
Sebastien
This is your decision Sebastien, and we respect it. Hopefully you will
reconsider and help up make things good in the process, hands-on, with
the tools that we have available. You are always welcome back!!
Thank you and take care!
Tomek
--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info
