Julio M. Merino Vidal wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have "recently" been trying other OSes in their development versions
> and I saw that many of them tell the user about the situation (that
> the system may fail) and make it very clear how to get involved to
> report problems.  That certainly had some effect on me because I
> quickly saw how to report the bugs and felt somehow that the
> developers cared about what I had to say.  (Maybe I'm biased as in
> having sent lots of bug reports in the past... but anyway.)
> 
> I think we could do something similar in NetBSD, giving some use to
> our currently empty motd.  My idea of this is attached.  Of course the
> text could be reworded; I'm just proposing the idea.  It basically
> provides different motds for the different development versions we
> provide (current, betas and rcs); the default motd (for stable
> versions) is left untouched.
> 
> What do you think about this?

I like the principle. Some comments, though:

* -current is not really an alpha release. An alpha release implies at
least that *some* testing has gone into it, and that it will eventually
become a beta release. I don't think that's the case with -current.
* I feel that the texts are too long to comfortably put in motd. I
personally would be happy with anything up to about half as many lines.
18 lines extra over and above the current message would pretty much fill
the screen, and I don't think we want that.

-- 
Gillette - the best a man can forget