On Sat Jun 30 2007 at 15:48:49 +0100, Liam Foy wrote:
> On 29/06/07, Ernesto Bascon <ebasconp@gmail.com> wrote:
> >The question could be:
> >
> >What can the very very newbie community do to help?
> >
> >I am a C, C++, Java programmer, but I do not have the needed skills to
> >work on the kernel or on that stuff, so, I am not able to help coding
> >the missing things, but maybe completing some documentation missing or
> >improving something very very easy could be the way.
> >
> >Anyway, the list of "things to do" in the website are for people
> >already related to the project and not for newbies like me. So, what
> >can the newbie community do to help?
> >
> >kind regards,
> >
> >
> >eto
> 
> Helping can be a simple as testing 4.0 within your daily NetBSD usage (and 
> try
> and test whatever you can). Its really that simple.

Especially "first impression" type stuff is important.  See if a clean
installation works for your machine configuration, if the documentation
for installation makes sense and so forth.  Developers typically do
weird custom installations and upgrades, so problems in these areas
aren't noticed easily, but IMHO they are the most critical areas for a
new release.

Also, collecting "I tested this and this on this hardware, here's
the report" type of information is very valuable for deciding release
stability.  It's a shame there is no official wiki for amassing this
information to.  The problems ideally will show up in PRs, but that
doesn't give a good estimate as to all that has been tested.

-- 
Antti Kantee <pooka@iki.fi>                     Of course he runs NetBSD
http://www.iki.fi/pooka/                          http://www.NetBSD.org/
    "la qualité la plus indispensable du cuisinier est l'exactitude"