Re: Regarding MESSAGEs during pkg_add installation of meta packages

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

I'm glad you are finding this discussion welcoming.  NetBSD/pkgsrc is
always looking for new contributors.  The GSOC thing is a little awkward
because their tend to be project descriptions from long ago.  Also, some
people, including me, don't want to really participate as I view it as a
Google recruiting activity and it tends to expect those helpign to have
google accounts, be signed in, etc.  So I don't pay attention to the
project descriptions, and don't mentor *within* the GSOC context.


My quick reaction is that deprecating/removing MESSAGE is a large number
of steps each of which are in some sense fairly simple, but also may
need a good understanding of the package's unique situation about how to
address it.  Actually removing them is easy; I could type a few shell
commands and do it in probably 30 minutes.  But that wouldn't be
socially acceptable.  So it really isn't a good fit for a 8 week project
of the sort I think is intended.

The normal new path for a pkgsrc contributor is creating new packages
(in pkgsrc-wip) or preparing updates to existing packages.  Often this
is driven by someone using pkgsrc and finding that they want a package
to exist or be better.  I'm not saying that's the only path, just that
it's typical.


I am unclear on linux syscall for emulation status, but that is probably
more the big chunk of programming/debugging that would cause you to
really learn something, and do something that others aren't doing
becuase it's too big.