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Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1998 03:40:48 +0100 (CET)
Organization: Ninth Circle Enterprises
From: Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>
To: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Subject: RE: tree access
Cc: netbsd-advocacy@netbsd.org

On 19-Dec-98 Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> As heartwarming as all the recent "I volunteer" statements have been,
> the majority of people who have successfully made use of developer
> access have been people who first demonstrated strong ability to
> contribute beforehand. The bulk of people who've volunteered without a 
> track record haven't made it anywhere.

*shrug* I can understand yer point of view and I am _not_ saying that any
clooless newbie (like I was 6 months ago, I am now a newbie) should get commit
access/priviliges. It's just that the default stance of somewhat distant elitism
to newcoming programmers and the like is not really good PR. I am glad I had some
help from a certain number of people who brought my knowledge quickly on par with
the UNIX levels. But I also know that a lot gets said, and nothing done.
 
> I would suggest that those who want to pitch in can do so without even 
> having tree access -- just find things you would like fixed, fix them
> and submit patches. PRs with good patches in them almost always get
> fixed immediately. If you can show that you really intend to
> contribute and have requisite ability, you'll likely get tapped.

Well, the reason I was addressing the issue was because of the overlapping effort
some people and I are undertaking with respect to the userlands of Free, Net and
Open. We will only provide back patches/diffs when we have done something of
which we can reflect back and say: "Yeah, this is a very worthwhile addition to
the BSDs". For PR's it might be different. But just to think another point, how
well are PR's treated? Let us take PR's older than 1 year. Do they exist? If they
do, are they fixed in a new version of the sources without closing the PR's? This
is something that has a high priority in my vision with regard to `bugfixing' as
this eliminates the hassle of legacy PR's. Plus it decreases the overall number
of PR's and gives the users a good feeling when they spot activity in that area.

I myself would be happy to bugfix PR's away, as I am trying to do under FreeBSD,
but since I have no spare box at this moment to install NetBSD unto I am severly
limited in my ways. So the only thing I can hope to contribute back on a
semi-short term is the BSD Boosters effort. I can only hope that the initiative
the BSD Boosters are starting/undertaking will be followed up by other efforts to
fix kernel related problems, device driver merges between the BSDs, to name but a
few of the possibilities one could do without commit priviliges...

---
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>