On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 02:33:32AM -0700, Dax Kelson wrote:
Plus the OpenSWAN developers say that they have no problem accepting patches from Americans. This way, if needed, RH can feed patches upstream.
Yes, this is key.
I heard that the "no-patches-from-americans" was one of the major stumbling block on getting FreeSWAN into RH.
Well, we need to separate kernel space from user space.
As kernel group manager, I asked for a review of the FreeSWAN kernel patches because IPSEC was highly desirable. The review came back very long and overwhelmingly negative. It was not a case of "there are a lot of things to fix", but rather "this code is really not worth fixing". This was not just an individual opinion, but rather a shared response by all reviewers.
So the fact that they wouldn't accept patches from americans on the kernel side didn't have the opportunity to be a practical problem because our experts decided it was not fixable. It would have been a blocking problem otherwise.
When we decided that IPSEC was of strategic value, we asked David Miller to do an IPSEC stack from scratch, designed for Linux and to be acceptable to all the kernel maintainers. There is no doubt that he succeeded admirably.
The user space side, however, is an entirely different affair. David was certainly not happy with the FreeSWAN kernel patches, but while he initially worked with kame/racoon for getting IPSEC going, he saw the *SWAN development work on userspace and was impressed; he contacted me to suggest that we consider switching. Having a maintained user-space that is intended for Linux and accepts patches without trying to score political points is a big plus.
michaelkjohnson
"He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book." Linux Application Development -- Ben Franklin http://people.redhat.com/johnsonm/lad/