>However, I do think that at some stage the RISCBSD team should consider
>'freezing' development for a month or so while they catch up on
>documentation, tidying up the FTP site and CD etc.  This must be almost
>impossible to do on a 'moving target'.

>I'd also recommend re-writing the instructions on the assumption that
>some people are going to use UNIXFS for transferring sets... I had nearly
>resigned myself to buying a boxfull of floppies before I found UNIXFS!

Yep I would love to freeze development if only there was not so much I have to
do ...

A significant code freeze is upon us though. NetBSD 1.2 is in a code freeze
position at the moment and I have starting to build test snap shots (I'll put
some several new 1.2 bits up later today)
Once 1.2 is release I do not expect very many changes to the the standard
binaries. A new CD release will be built from the 1.2 release and I do not
expect many changes to be made to that.
I have plans to tidy up the ftp site but as with most things time is precious.
The 1.2 freeze also freezes a 1.2 kernel. This does not mean development has
stopped. it just means that 1.2 is a frozen development branch which should
have a lot of the bugs ironed out.

However a lot has changed in the kernel since the 1.2 branch was cut. major
bugs fixes will go in but I have done things like rewritten the IRQ subsystem
(drastically reducing latency). This work is not in the 1.2 kernel.

As a result I expect to see folks running a 1.2 release with just the kernel
being updated more frequently.

Also on the point of documentation....

The idea is that users also contribute. I could be wrong here but I suspect the
reason users are not writing device drivers, debugging the kernel etc. is that
they do not fully understand it and that it is rather complex.=, not to mention
lack of time.
Now if I freeze all riscbsd development for a month and write docs then no
kernel development will happen. If you ask most users I would suspect that they
would prefer me to spend my time working on the kernel rather than docs as docs
are something that other people can write but the kernel isn't.

When you have a number of things to be done it is surely better to make the
most of the skills those people have.

Ok enough of the ranting ;-)

Perhaps we need to organise a group to work on documentation.
As well as a new install guide we could do with guides other parts of RiscBSD
e.g. X, networking, building kernels etc.

Any thoughts anyone ?

Cheers,
				Mark

-- 
Mark Brinicombe				amb@physig.ph.kcl.ac.uk
Research Associate			http://www.ph.kcl.ac.uk/~amb/
Department of Physics			tel: 0171 873 2894
King's College London			fax: 0171 873 2716