by homeworld.redbacknetworks.com with SMTP; 17 Dec 1998 18:22:16 -0000
	id 44F7A148; Thu, 17 Dec 1998 13:21:18 -0500 (EST)
To: Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com>
Cc: netbsd-advocacy@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: Sun jumping on Linux bandwagon
References: <199812171115.DAA23576@shell17.ba.best.com>
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Date: 17 Dec 1998 13:21:18 -0500
In-Reply-To: Todd Whitesel's message of "Thu, 17 Dec 1998 03:15:56 -0800 (PST)"
Message-ID: <87vhjafx41.fsf@jekyll.piermont.com>
Lines: 44


BTW, I'm not attacking you in this: I just think most of what you are
stating is misperception.

Todd Whitesel <toddpw@best.com> writes:
>     1. It seems like a lot of newbie contributed PR's die in
>        committee.

I've never seen this happen. If you have a bug, we try to fix it. On
rare occasions, someone posts a PR like "I think that the kernel
should be renamed /gazorknoplant" and it gets closed because it is
neither a good idea nor a bug, but that happens once in a very great
while. PRs are PRs, and no one pays attention to who submitted the
bug.

Now we *do* have a problem with getting people to fix PRs in
general. I've brought on five developers thus far explicitly to work
on the PR database, and none have panned out. People just hate working 
on this. I'll keep trying, though.

>     2. Outside developers don't care about helping to debug compile errors in
>     -current. They would be much happier if we could provide regular non-DOA
>     snapshots,

We largely do. Havard has been doing an amazing job with this on
port-i386, for instance -- our snapshot rate is now around twice a
month. Obviously the snapshots aren't perfect, since -current is not a
release.

We also now have a build lab, but it is suffering from lack of
administrator cycles.

>     3. The projects page on the web site doesn't appear to get updated much.

David Brownlee has been working on our web stuff a bunch. It is a work 
in progress. Compare the overall look to a year ago, and there is no
comparison in how much it has improved.

>     3. Here I think that just having someone massage source-changes into a
>     daily digest would be a good start.

Todd Vierling does this already.

Perry