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To: Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>
cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Another bright idea.. 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 15 Sep 1997 10:59:26 PDT."
             <341D777E.446B9B3D@whistle.com> 
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 12:01:37 -0700
Message-ID: <8732.874350097@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
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This sounds like the more general (and often discussed) problem of
trying to organize loose "projects" for people approaching to project
with a desire to help out but no clear objectives of their own to push
(which is usually how most of the really serious development occurs).
In such a project farm, you'd have your "Grand Projects" for the truly
ambitious or well-staffed ("we're the entire senior CS class of
Singapore University and we're looking for a final project"), "Middle
projects" that someone could take on solo and still be challenged by
it, and "Grunt work" projects like changing all the bogus EOF's to
-1. :)

I've already asked our contract webmistress if she has any interest in
putting something CGI-ish together for doing this via the web server,
but I haven't heard back from her yet.  She may be on vacation or
something.

					Jordan


> We have many many stylistic or variable-type problems
> in teh system, that are basically "mechanical changes"
> 
> We also have a very large community of people out there who are
> just learning about freeBSD, and would like
> to do something useful that would allow them to learn their way around
> the source tree. Maybe the following might be a good idea.
> 
> After seeing jordan,and bruce slug it out over 'types'
> and seeing thousands of commites re: -1 -> EOF via Philip
> maybe it might be possible for us to have one central place where 
> people could register the existance of a 'global bogon'
> /src/BOGONS?
> 
> with a suggested mechanocal fix, and then we could allow
> juniour aspiring hackers, with a full source tree, to perform these
> multi-mega-patches, and submit them via a quick review and then into the
> tree.
> 
> we have a great resource in the number of people who could do this
> sort of thing. We should use them..
> 
> thought?
> 
> julian