[markjdb]

> Or is this just how it is on FreeBSD?

It's not. We do a lot of code review, and it's done publicly. It's easy to look at the commit logs. I find it telling that the article doesn't spend even one word trying to delve into our code review practices. This case was an aberration.

[ruph123]

The core group had a chance to state this when they were asked for a response. This one word could’ve come from any of the FreeBSD devs contacted by the author. Instead back came either nothing or a general statement without any real message.

[markjdb]

That's fair. At the time, though, it wasn't clear that the author's angle was that FreeBSD doesn't have a culture of doing code reviews. We do, and I don't think one has to look very hard to see that.

[mannykannot]

The FreeBSD organization should not have had to be told what issues this incident raises, so this response raises one more flag about how the organization is handling it.

This defensiveness in FreeBSD's response, this reaction of minimizing rather than facing up to the seriousness of the problem revealed here, the attempt to redirect the conversation towards anything but the specific issue, only reinforces the impression that FreeBSD may not be ready to deal with it effectively.

Of course, as FreeBSD is open source, its users are in no position to demand anything, but any potential user may, and should, attempt to determine how likely it is meet her needs in all respects.

[cbsks]

Well, at least once code was committed without being thoroughly reviewed. Clearly FreeBSD’s development process needs some refinement to ensure that the entire code is actually reviewed during a code review.

[cbsks]

As a FreeBSD user, that's good to hear :)

Has there been any discussion about why the process failed in this case, and what is going to be done to make sure something similar doesn't happen in the future?

This is the review for the original commit, in case anyone is interested: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D26137

[markjdb]

There's some discussion happening now and I do expect to see some process changes coming out of this. It's tricky. The review you link does nominally follow the process of creating a review and having some discussion, but there isn't much actual code review happening there.