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From: Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
Message-Id: <199812181330.FAA24226@shell17.ba.best.com>
Subject: Re: Sun jumping on Linux bandwagon
In-Reply-To: <87vhjafx41.fsf@jekyll.piermont.com> from "Perry E. Metzger" at "Dec 17, 98 01:21:18 pm"
To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1998 05:30:11 -0800 (PST)
Cc: netbsd-advocacy@NetBSD.ORG
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> BTW, I'm not attacking you in this: I just think most of what you are
> stating is misperception.

Glad to hear it. I'm not the only one with this "misperception", however.

But I'd rather not argue about it. Everyone has been very nice in hearing
me out so far, so I'll just keep pushing on the stuff I think needs work.

BTW the "Iwo Daemon" logo is exactly what contributing to NetBSD feels like
right now.  If nothing else, this is what I want to improve.

>Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com> writes:
>>     1. It seems like a lot of newbie contributed PR's die in
>>        committee.
> 
> I've never seen this happen. If you have a bug, we try to fix it. On
> rare occasions, someone posts a PR like "I think that the kernel
> should be renamed /gazorknoplant" and it gets closed because it is
> neither a good idea nor a bug, but that happens once in a very great
> while. PRs are PRs, and no one pays attention to who submitted the
> bug.

Hmm, maybe we should, at least when we reject a PR. If I sent a PR and
heard nothing for a while, and it didn't say fixed when I looked at the
web site, I'd certainly think that a ball had been dropped somewhere.

Can gnats automatically send email when the state of a PR changes?

> Now we *do* have a problem with getting people to fix PRs in
> general. I've brought on five developers thus far explicitly to work
> on the PR database, and none have panned out. People just hate working 
> on this. I'll keep trying, though.

How about giving Mason Loring Bliss the necessary access and trying him out?

He _did_ volunteer to do PR work last week. I can't believe he "didn't work
out" if he never even started on it.

Have we asked people _why_ things did not pan out? Perhaps there is a
valuable lesson there that is being missed. Such has happened to me at
work enough times to convince me that the question is worth asking.

>>     2. Outside developers don't care about helping to debug compile errors in
>>     -current. They would be much happier if we could provide regular non-DOA
>>     snapshots,
> 
> We largely do. Havard has been doing an amazing job with this on
> port-i386, for instance -- our snapshot rate is now around twice a
> month. Obviously the snapshots aren't perfect, since -current is not a
> release.

Of course. Perhaps I am just burnt out after 2 or 3 months of forcing arm32
to "Work, Dammit" after Mark B.'s big merge effort.

Anyway, I will continue with my plan to do unofficial snapshots of arm32 and
(eventually) Alpha, and we'll see where it goes from there. If all I end up
doing is taking some stress off of the port-masters, then I'm still happy.

My real goal is to get set up to be building lots of packages on top of
-current regularly, so I can catch a lot of the dumb bugs while waiting for
other builds, and save everyone else a lot of otherwise unproductive time.

> We also now have a build lab, but it is suffering from lack of
> administrator cycles.

Ah. That would explain a great deal. I wish there was something I could do
help there, but something in my den at home is a lot less strain on my time.

> >     3. The projects page on the web site doesn't appear to get updated much.
> 
> David Brownlee has been working on our web stuff a bunch. It is a work 
> in progress. Compare the overall look to a year ago, and there is no
> comparison in how much it has improved.

Okay, I came in about six months ago I think, and the port pages have become
much more professional. Perhaps my real beef is that the web site doesn't
"suck in" new users IMHO. I'll need to think about this some more and put
some HTML where my mouth is.

> >     3. Here I think that just having someone massage source-changes into a
> >     daily digest would be a good start.
> 
> Todd Vierling does this already.

Are we talking http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/index.html ??

I was thinking of something a little more nuts-and-boltsy, but brief, so
people who follow current-users but don't have the intestinal fortitude to
subscribe to source-changes can still see an 'executive summary' of it to
see if their favorite -current fix/feature has gone in yet. The "Recent
Changes" section on the web site is mainly the big stuff.

Does what I am describing in fact exist and I have somehow missed it?

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com