Re: Port help wanted/needed?

[John Carr <jcarr%poethecat.com@localhost>]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 11:46:28AM -0800, jscottkasten%yahoo.com@localhost 
wrote:
> Actually, there probably are plenty of places you can help, especially with a 
> strong admin and security background.
> Some things might involve doing builds.  I know you said you were not a 
> coder, but I'm sure you're no stranger to running an automated build or 
> launching a make process to configure, build, and install an application.
> If you are willing to do that, the doors are wide open.
> Many of the ports run behind the i386 port even at the same release number in 
> some areas.  For example, i386 kernels ship with packet filtering and cgd 
> enabled.  Yet those types of things are not enabled, and often of unknown 
> status in many ports.

All very good points. I just wasn't sure if there were areas that folks
were already concentrating where I'd be just wasting my time!

Very true. I'll admit, I haven't run NetBSD as my primary i386 desktop
in a few years now, so I don't know how big the differences are now. I
think it'd be worth it to get it going in a VM and start comparing. I
can start beating on that pretty soon.

> Another area is pkgsrc builds.  Look at what has been done, and see what is 
> needed.  I've been working with the hpcmips port the last year.  Who knew 
> that the mesa OpenGL port actually worked.....until it was tried.

Heh. Good point. I can't say that I've done a meta-pkgs build of gnome
on that thing in the past few years. I've never been able to get it to
complete in the past due to different things. I guess it's time to fire
that back up.
(which, of course, begs the question of who would want to run gnome on a
3/60....)

> Consider also that lack of hardware need not block someone from contributing. 
>  I've had great success using things like GXEMUL and others to run a specific 
> port in an emulator.  I've built the bulk of pkgsrc for hpcmips 4.0 that way.
> I think if you just start "doing" you will find a niche into which you can 
> contribute pretty quickly.  Some of these lists are pretty quiet, but all it 
> takes sometimes is a newbie to wake up some of the old timers.

Right on.. thanks for the pointers. I hadn't started playing with tme
until yesterday since I wasn't sure how stable it was... it's excellent
all around. The nice thing is that I'm pretty familiar with NetBSD due
to prior lives, so diving back in has been a breeze...