By my lights, there should be some sort of "referendum" system,
loosely analogous to gnats, where developers and non-developers alike
(perhaps the developers could "moderate") may post, track, reflect
upon, vote on, etc. different ideas.  There does seem to be a problem
with "locking" of projects; perhaps one way around this is for someone
to host a NetBSD source tree where non-developers can commit, a la
pkgsrc-wip.  It could be integrated with NetBSD gnats as well, so that
for PRs with many individual patches or patch revisions could be
better followed and used by developers.  Instead of having to wade
through open PRs and pull the patches out of the text, one could
simply check it out of one repository and commit it to another.

In addition, given that most NetBSD ports are so easily
cross-compiled, perhaps we could/should use tinderbox as well.  And
perhaps I'm being a bit of an idealist, but I'd like to think that if
more people were acutely aware of what was going on with NetBSD and
what its strengths were--and were able to be more positively
reinforced for being involved--things could get better.

Of course, we don't want the kind of chaos common with Linux et. al.,
but IMHO there may be a happy median between the left and the right
...

--Blair


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"The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the
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approaching change.  The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the the
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_Phenomenology of Spirit_ 5:11