Hi, we live in a time where survival of NetBSD is getting harder and harder. There have never been such great efforts of the directly-competing OSs (I'm talking about Linux) trying to make the world self-centric as now. In face of this threat, time is running short. With gnome, one of the major desktop environments is about to become Linux-only, Xfce also announced with the last release they had to drop several features for BSDs. And there surely will be more applications to go that way. Without blaming somebody for that (though in the case of gnome, there surely is one), the BSDs have to come back to their advantages over other OSs to clarify why development for them IS necessary and not much work. One of the great strengths of *BSDs over other OSs is its good documentation and its clear design. No Linux has such a complete 'guide' as the BSDs have, such a good description of the VFS, such good and complete manpages. But the current documentation is becoming outdated, and the holes in it don't get stuffed fast enough, too. Despite for the content, the other great mess is the wiki. I know there was much work spent in it, but currently there is still no clean solution for user-generated documentation. One could take the possibility to do the missing work, and finally migrate contents from the old user wiki to the new official one. The last part of this documentation would be current and good advertising materials. One or two persons familiar with Scribus or Inkscape could accomplish shiny new advertisement to lay out on conferences etc. After talking a bit around in the various NetBSD-IRC-channels, I was encouraged asking for this, or rather trying to announce it. In three weeks, from the 10th to 14th August, there will be the CCC camp (http://camp.ccc.de) where few NetBSD-guys will be caught in an area less than one km^2. You clearly don't have to be there in person, and even for the attendees of the camp the change is perfect for sitting in front of your computer 24/7. ;) Most of the communication will be in #netbsd-code (Freenode) anyway. I think, such a perfect possibility for a hackathon is rare (to be specific, only once every two years :P). So: Are there people willing to participate in such a hackathon? I will bring up a list of possible topics to work on next week (if you have suggestions, just drop me a mail). Regards, Julian PS: If there are people who attend the camp and would like to have a (Net)BSD village: Mail me. I was trying to organize something, but until know there were few people interested.
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