Dave McGuire <mcguire@neurotica.com> writes:
> >Being in core is a sucky job. At the moment, it is my understanding
> >that people in Core are working on a plan to make it a less sucky job
> >in the future. However, all this impacts is project management. The
> >code base continues to develop at an ever-increasing rate -- we have
> >something like double the number of developers we did only 18 months
> >ago, and quality isn't suffering from what I can tell.
> 
>   Again my point had nothing to do with code quality...I sing its praises
> nearly every day.  I appreciate the clarification; I do hope that this plan
> that you speak of helps things out for core members.
> 
>   From your perspective, is there anything that the user community can do to
> make being in core less sucky?

There isn't much you can probably do for the folks in Core per se,
other than being nice to them.

My personal opinion for some time has been that the concept of Core
itself is a problem -- the job inevitably has to be bad because of the
nature of what Core is set up to do. I do *not* claim we should
abandon our ruthless pursuit of quality code, and that means that
inevitably some things can't be done democratically. However, as
things stand, Core ends up being a choke-point for certain kinds of
decisions -- inevitably decisions in which one group or another ends
up unhappy. Changing that would make serving on Core less unpleasant.

However, this is just my opinion. I'm not in Core, and I know that the
people in Core have different opinions on what the nature of the
problem is.

From my perspective, however, the right thing for all of us to do --
and remember, NetBSD is a user maintained operating system -- is to
pitch in and work on improving the system. All the people working
actively on NetBSD started out as random users who wanted something or 
other fixed. Often I see people post on a mailing list "hey, when is X 
going to be fixed", and the answer is often "please help us fix X!"

The more people who are working on the problems, the smoother the
system becomes and the less we have to worry that other systems are
somehow stealing our thunder. The fact that the users and the
developers are basically the same group is what makes open source
software like NetBSD work out.

So, even though I don't know if you can help Core out, you can always
help the project keep getting better and better. That's what I think
the users can mostly do to help.

Perry