On Thu, 20 Mar 1997 20:58:25 +1100 
 Giles Lean <giles@nemeton.com.au> wrote:

 > > This seems to be the issue that NetBSD always stumbles on.
 > > I happily use FreeBSD's system which populates /usr/local. Beyond
 > > that I don't care. Let's do a monkey-see-monkey-do on this one.
 > 
 > Seconded.

...ok.  So, there seems to be enough of a consensus that this is
something NetBSD users want.

I've done a lot of work to integrate the FreeBSD ports/pkg stuff into
my local development sources at work.

I have reasons other than "installing packages for users is easy"...
Eventually, I want this stuff to actually install the OS, as well.

To achieve the goals of:

	- provide an easy packages system for NetBSD users
and
	- improve the way the OS is installed

I need a volunteer to be the "point of contact" for this subsystem in the
NetBSD tree.  Lack of a person to do that has been the only reason
that I have not committed it to date.  I have been unable to find one
in the current NetBSD developer (i.e. has source acccess) circle, so it's
time to solicit the user community.

This person's responsibilities will be:

	- do the initial import of the freebsd tools into the netbsd
	  tree, and make the modifications necessary to integrate into
	  the netbsd environment (most of this work has been done by
	  me, but it's a good way to "learn the ropes")

	- make the improvements necessary to support additional features
	  required for non-"/usr/local" and OS installation

	- fix bugs in the subsystem as they are found and/or reported

	- coordinate with the freebsd folks to make sure our changes
	  get fed back to them, and to make the "ports collection"
	  usable under netbsd (quite a lot of those diffs they supply
	  have #ifdef __FreeBSD__ in them, rather than an appropriate
	  #if BSD > ...)

	- create and maintain documentation (manpages and www pages)
	  regarding this subsystem

	- and the icing on the cake ... this person would build binary
	  packages for one (or more :-) netbsd architectures and make
	  them available on ftp.netbsd.org

	- must be really dedicated to doing this

If you've been looking for a way to get more involved, but didn't know
where you could contribute, now's your chance!  :-)

I'll take one, maybe two volunteers for this ... if you are interested
in this enough to be the one who has to fix the bugs :-), please send
me a note at thorpej@netbsd.org.

Jason R. Thorpe
NetBSD Core Group
<thorpej@NetBSD.ORG>