On Tue, 23 May 2000, Michael Lucas wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I've been asked to do a general article on the present and future of
> BSD.  I'll be covering the three big BSDs, with a mention of the
> various commercialized versions such as MacOS X and miscellaneous
> embedded systems.
> 
	Good to hear :)

> Is there anything in particular you NetBSD folks are trying to
> publicize about your future plans?  Are there any issues you're
> currently struggling with that you particularly want help with?  I
> have a NetBSD Alpha sitting on my desk, but I don't follow your
> internal dialogue that closely.

	I believe we could really do with someone interested in hacking
	on the Xfree86 support for alpha. AFAIK it would be hacking in
	the machette sense as Xfree still regards the world through
	distinctly i386 glasses, but the support would benefit quite a
	few people...
	
> If you have anything in particular you're trying to get out the word
> about, please let me know and I'll include it if at all possible.

	Speaking for myself, some things about which I'm excited:
	- pkgsrc - the ability to build so easily from source made my
	  transition from an a.out system to complete elf so easy - I
	  just made a note of what packages I had installed, wiped and
	  installed the system, put on pkgrsc and ran make install in the
	  appropriate directories.
	- the upcoming 1.5 release - should be supporting quite a
	  few new platforms, including the hpcmips handhelds with an
	  X server, plus much improved pcmcia support and a bunch of
	  other stuff.
	- software raid with RAIDframe, particularly combined with the
	  pciide driver
	- The Unified buffer cache, SMP, and new scsipi branches that
	  should go into -current as soon as 1.5 branches.
	- The continuing cleanup and bus_space-ing of drivers - existing
	  code continues to be converted across to better MI interfaces
	  and style.

	But thats just me :)
	


		David/absolute
				       -- www.netbsd.org: No hype required --