I wonder if your motivation to work on this is personally finding it
confusing, or something else. It seems like a fairly small effort to
adjust pkg_add, and a bit more to think about pkgin.
My motivation was nothing more than just finding some organisation who is participating in Google Summer of Code 2025.
I found a few, NetBSD is more Operating System and Kernel oriented, hence I went through the projects and found two :
1. Emulating missing syscalls for linux compatibility.
2. This MESSAGE removal.
Now after understanding a little about how NetBSD works, I am eager to learn more about it. And hence, contribute where possible. Although my initial aim was to get into GSOC, now it has been shifted towards open source contributions. All the past organisations I have tried into, simply ghost my doubts or ignore me as a beginner. You (NetBSD team) are the first ones to not do so...
Yeah, coming back to MESSAGE, since the conversation has been shifted from UI/UX improvement to removing MESSAGE files completely, these could be potential next steps:
1. Prepare for MESSAGE removal
- If the consensus is to drop MESSAGE entirely, I can start looking into what needs to change in pkgsrc to remove support for it.
- Bulk-remove MESSAGE files from packages after giving maintainers a chance to migrate important info. How to do it though?
2. Ensuring proper alternatives are used
- Move the package MESSAGE to README.pkgsrc
- Handle default configs via CONF_FILES
- Automate script handling where possible.
3. Do the same for pkgin
What do you think about it? Or is there a standard way to approach this?
If you approve this, I can create a proposal and submit it.
Thanks,