Re: NetBSD install experiences

[Sad Clouds <cryintothebluesky%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Mon, 11 May 2020 12:00:12 +0200
tg%gmplib.org@localhost (Torbjörn Granlund) wrote:

> Please consider working on the NetBSD install experience!  Now even I,
> who is far from a newbie and have tons of patience, consider giving
> up. If this had been my first experience with NetBSD, I would have
> given up long before I had arrived to ISSUE 5, I'm afraid.

I'm not a NetBSD developer so not sure what the current priorities are.
I'm sure you raise valid points, I recently went through a similar
experience when trying to install NetBSD-9.0 on ARM SBC. The install
itself was OK, but there was no good documentation on how to make the
install image bootable. Yes the magic command sequence was buried
somewhere in the man page and I got help on the mailing list, but the
lack of clear instructions on the wiki pages make the first user
experience somewhat underwhelming.

I don't think this is unique to NetBSD and I've seen similar issues
with other open source and commercial software projects. The truth is
there is a lot more to good quality software, which people often tend to
overlook - robust design, complete unit and integration testing, concise
documentation, code reliability and scalability, etc. None of these are
particularly exciting, so open source developers tend to focus on those
tasks that they find interesting and the boring stuff never gets done.

This is also a big problem with commercial software. You have big
multi-billion dollar companies that are mainly focused on generating
profits. Sometimes there is no effort to invest into a highly skilled
team that understand software engineering and can develop bespoke
solutions. The approach seems to be - lets get some open source code
that maybe could do the job, because it's free, and lets outsource all
development to some place where the labour is cheap.

NetBSD occasionally sponsor various projects and pay developers to
deliver specific features. Maybe one of those features will be a new
installer or package manager, depending on how much money they can
raise via donations.