On 7/29/06, Gavan Fantom <gavan@coolfactor.org> wrote:
> 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.

OK; another developer had mentioned that privately too.  I'll rename
motd.alpha to motd.current and change the text to say "development
release".

> * 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.

Hmm indeed.  As I'm running now with vesafb, I had not thought about that.

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84@gmail.com>
The Julipedia - http://julipedia.blogspot.com/