Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 21:14:07 +0000 From: James Raynard <james@jraynard.demon.co.uk> To: Wes Peters <softweyr@xmission.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD mentor program (was: Stealable idea?) Message-ID: <19971121211407.44634@jraynard.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <199711210537.WAA15178@obie.softweyr.ml.org>; from Wes Peters on Thu, Nov 20, 1997 at 10:37:56PM -0700 References: <199711200355.UAA13839@obie.softweyr.ml.org> <370.880078739@time.cdrom.com> <199711210537.WAA15178@obie.softweyr.ml.org>
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On Thu, Nov 20, 1997 at 10:37:56PM -0700, Wes Peters wrote:
>
> To which Jordan K. Hubbard replied:
> > Hmmm. Well, just to inject a note of cold reality into this, we have
> > a lot of people who bill themselves that way but they don't appear to
> > be much on taking on any actual projects, it seems, or we'd have had
> > our zip library API or our Turbovision based object set for TCL or our
> > device registration mechanism or our new package system (based on much
> > of the previous) or any of the host of other things which I and others
> > have called out for over the last 3 years (and which need to be
> > essentially written from scratch, having found no appropriate "canned
> > solutions" out there).
Would it be worth adding these (and no doubt others) to the "What Is Needed"
in the "Contributing to FreeBSD" section of the Handbook?
> I don't have a lot of bandwidth left for big coding projects in my
> copious spare time, which amounts to 2 hours on Sunday afternoon, if I'm
> lucky, each week. I do, however, have an hour or so each night after
> the baby goes to sleep before I completely bomb out, and can
> occasionally write lucid replies to queries during those times. If
> someone wants to tap into the expertise I have and ask a few questions,
> I'm more than glad to help.
I know this isn't what you were asking about, but there are plenty of
odds and ends that might suit people without the time or inclination to
become a kernel hacker:
1. Check whether all FreeBSD's contributed software is up to date.
2. Port more recent versions of contributed software to FreeBSD.
3. Convert contributed software to use /usr/src/contrib.
4. Try to find year 2000 bugs (and hopefully fix them).
5. Build the source tree (or just a small part of it) with extra
warnings enabled (eg -Wmissing-prototypes) and clean up some
of the warnings.
6. Remind committers to send patches for ports and contributed
source back to the original authors. :-)
7. If you run -current and have enough spare CPU cycles/disk space,
do a "make release" every now and again and try to install it
on a spare machine.
8. Read the freebsd-bugs list. There might be a problem you can
comment constructively on (ie not just shout "me too!!"), or
with patches you can test. Or you could even try to fix a problem
yourself.
9. Read through the FAQ and the Handbook. If there's something that's
badly explained, out of date or even just completely wrong, let us
know. Better still, send us a fix (SGML is not difficult to learn,
but there is no objection to ASCII submissions).
10. Read the freebsd-questions list and the comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
newsgroup occasionally (or even frequently). It can be very
satisfying to share your expertise and help people solve their
problems; sometimes, you can gain ideas for things to work on.
Occasionally, you may even learn something new :-)
Well, that's ten possibilities without thinking too hard (some of
which don't even require programming skills!). Maybe a "non-guru"
sub-section of "Contributing to FreeBSD" is called for?
--
In theory, theory is better than practice. In practice, it isn't.
James Raynard, Edinburgh, Scotland. http://www.freebsd.org/~jraynard/
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