[tptacek]

This is vintage Theo. It has the virtue of sounding correct, but, because OpenBSD ships threaded libraries, it probably lacks the virtue of being correct.

I had a similar experience (note, though: I have a history with Theo, who I know/knew personally).

When I was at Arbor Networks, we shipped appliances that monitored ISP backbones that were based on OpenBSD. An analysis process that happened to allocate a lot of memory would occasionally lose a giant chunk of memory. I was able to produce a reduction of the bug and narrow down where in the VM subsystem the bug was happening, but I wasn't able to recommend a fix. Theo's response, to what was clearly a serious bug in OpenBSD, was "I'm not going to look at UVM; it's just Chuck Cranor's thesis project".

I lobbied for a switch to FreeBSD, but the monkey.org people that ran the place were dyed-in-the-wool for OpenBSD. :)

[Flow]

What happened next? Did the bug get fixed? Did you do a work-around somehow? Don't leave stories unfinished like this :)

[tptacek]

I actually don't know. Arbor could have had its dev team hunt for a fix for the bug, but that would have been silly; no way did it make sense for them to take ownership of a custom fork of the most complicated kernel subsystem. So we worked around the problem instead.

[pvg]

In the beginning, when Theo was cast out of NetBSD, someone rewrote this thing

http://www.skrause.org/humor/poohgoesapeshit.shtml

with Theo and other BSD-ish personalities as the characters. There are many stories of prickly people mellowing with age. It's unlikely there'll be such a story about him.

[gypsyharlot]

I don't see how his response was unreasonable.

[tptacek]

It helps to understand the role a virtual memory system has in an operating system kernel.

[fabulist]

Its also important to choose your security battles. I imagine there was another severe bug or two in a project as large as OpenBSD.

That being said, thats a petty and ridiculous reason not to deal with someone's code. This gentleman strikes be as a builder, not a maintainer; someone who wants to breeze through town like a cowboy, bring cool ideas to fruition, and move on to the next conquest while someone else keeps the system from falling apart. Thats not a judgment, we need people like that, but they probably shouldn't be the ones fielding emails.