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Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1998 13:06:00 +0100 (CET)
Organization: Ninth Circle Enterprises
From: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>
To: Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
Subject: Re: Sun jumping on Linux bandwagon
Cc: netbsd-advocacy@NetBSD.ORG, perry@piermont.com

On 18-Dec-98 Todd Whitesel wrote:

>>Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com> writes:
>>>     1. It seems like a lot of newbie contributed PR's die in
>>>        committee.
>> 
> 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.

Mayhaps, curiously enough this same kind of speak came up at FreeBSD's bug
mailinglist. And ever since Matthew Dillon got most of us back on track regarding
the pr's we have at least in my perception doubled the PR maintenance effort. And
Todd, does this have anything to do with Matt's effort? Because I see yer from
best.com as well ;)

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

It does.
 
>> 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.

The main thing about PR's is that access should be open towards the PR's, NetBSD
is open in that respect. What depends on that is that people should be able to
look at the code. I know I want to help out, but of all the three BSD's I know
which are free (Free, Net & Open) NetBSD is the biggest PITA to update the
sources. FreeBSD is the easiest with cvsup. Then OpenBSD with their anoncvs. And
NetBSD, since I cannot buy any CD which originates from the project itself, only
has the option to ftp sources and try to maintain a cvs repository with cvs and
sup, with no option to anoncvs. I am now going to try the pkgsrc.tar.gz and see
how far we can come with that one.
 
The current work that a few people and myself have been doing now _depends_ on
all three source trees. Thus far on our mountpoint which contains the three
source trees the NetBSD directory is violently empty.

>>>     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,

I know that as an `outside' developer, if I manage to catch a bug during a compile
and just mention it as a PR and even be able to provide a fix to it, that I'll be
happy just to have contributed to a worthy goal. This is the fanatism mayhaps
that makes/made Linux what it is today. This and their idiotic reverence of the
GPL, but that's another story...

> 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.

That's exactly the whole thing. I may make a false assumption here, but as far as
I was able to distill from the webpages the NetBSD Foundation issues a CURRENT
update _once_ a week. For serious developers this is too infrequent. The work I
do requires at least daily updates. The FreeBSD project has multiple hourly
updates which is even more productive. Imagine starting work on something and
ye're nearly finished when the next update is made and ye see someone committing
the stuff ye were preparing, another week is lost and frustration starts to mount
slightly. I may be taking it a little too harsh or general here, but ye
understand what I am aiming at.

>> 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.

I think most of the developers who are not hired by their boss to work on *BSD do
most of their coding at home. And thus if the means are not available from the
*BSD project/foundation/camp to provide easier access to for example sources,
then the project/foundation/camp is severly limiting itself. Offcourse, the
availability of resources is always a problem, but if those wacky Linux users can
do it, then at least rockstable server platforms like the *BSD's must be able to
do so as well...

>> >     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.

If I may compare yet again and again: look at what the FreeBSD page has became, a
visual eyepleaser IMHO. I do like NetBSD's original drawing, but further more it
has nothing that makes someone think: "Cool site". OpenBSD's site is somewhat
better, but not much. If one takes www.linux.org, www.l0pht.com,
www.php.net, www.visualirc.com then as an example ye can see that with simple
logo's and GFX one can make a visual impression that stays with the visitor. If
only the site got some more colors, for example the blue, yellow and red like in
the NetBSD bar at the button to name but a weird suggestion.

And like I said, the NetBSD CD's are unavailable for European users who prefer to
get the real thing and not some sort of hack like Cheap Bytes' version, or the
GateWay vol. 3. I want to help the projects out by making sure the money I spend
on the CD's flow back to the projects.

All of this is ment in the best of interest of the three BSD projects that are in
the world now.

---
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven                  Pax vobiscum...
asmodai(at)wxs.nl
Network/Security Specialist      <http://home.wxs.nl/~asmodai>
BSD & picoBSD: The Power to Serve     <http://www.freebsd.org>