FYI... (just in case anyone cares .)


 - Hubert

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 1997 19:52:07 +0200
From: Niklas Hallqvist <niklas@petra.appli.se>
To: announce@openbsd.org, misc@openbsd.org
Subject: ports chalkboard

Good morning.

As you may know we want to improve the quality of the ports subsystem
for the next OpenBSD release.  What is there now has sufficed to show
that the idea is good, but it isn't nearly as good as it should be to
be really satidfied.  A lot of ports compile and install well on
OpenBSD, but many also needs minor tweaking.  Some needs to be
filtered out entirely.

Since the FreeBSD ports collection is rather big, and noone has
stepped forward to take full responsibility of making it run well with
OpenBSD, we have come to the conclusion that we might do a cooperative
experiment.  We have setup a mailing list for discussion about the use
of the FreeBSD ports collection in OpenBSD, called ports@openbsd.org.
You can subscribe to it the usual way, via majordomo@openbsd.org.  We
have also made it simple to report bugs so that they won't fall
between the cracks by creating a "ports" category for sendbug(1).

The intention is that people willing to offer some help in getting the
ports collection become better, by testing and/or fixing ports, can
get together on ports@openbsd.org to coordinate what ports they've
tested on what architectures, and how to solve problems that are
found.  When a bug in a port is found, unless it's fixed by the
finder, it sohuld get reported to the gnats system i.e. sendbug(8).
That way we can easily track what ports are known not to work and
setup a "known bugs" list and use it as a basis when asking for
volunteer efforts.  Fixes to the ports subsystem are then fed back to
FreeBSD via our ports maintainer: imp@openbsd.org.

We believe that this is a good start for wannabe developers, as it
gives satisfactory results with pretty little of work put in, and it
gives you experiences in how Unix software is written.  So why not try
out some ports you are interested in, and get them fixed if they are
broken?  Help doing this will be available on the ports mailinglist.

Help us make all those ports usable by you!

Niklas Hallqvist

PS. For general info about the ports, look
<a href=http://www.openbsd.org/ports.html>here</a>!