Comment by kevans91

I was linked back to your reply because it seems that I've not really communicated this very well- there's nothing wrong specifically with how you represented the situation, and I'm sorry if I came across as angry about you specifically. Read the rest of this in that same tone.

I'm angry that this has blown up like it has, and I realize that Netgate hasn't helped themselves out at all with the statements they've been releasing. If I was a PR person, my immediate reaction would have been "Hey, we're pulling this from the build. Know you guys were all excited about it, but points to press release"

I'm trapped here, you know? I can't speak for the proportions of how bad it was because I'm just a kernel guy, not a security guy. If I say "I don't think it was really that bad," I can pretty much immediately be written off as unqualified to make those kinds of statements.

We did end up nearly entirely rewriting the driver, but a significant chunk of that was removing iflib to fix a load of vnet issues and simplify it. I'm proud of what we ended up with, but I'm not proud of how this was handled by pretty much everyone around me.

Finally, to me, the deadline was very real. I thought we could end up with something that I'd be able to merge in time for 13.0rc3 (builds started today) in a relatively non-disruptive manner. It wasn't until most of the time was up that time had passed until I realized what we had come up with, and started hoping that I could still pull it off with significant testing.