Date: Wed, 30 Aug 1995 01:20:17 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Computer Annex <annex2@viking.emcmt.edu> Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Developement Message-ID: <2368.809770817@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 29 Aug 1995 20:41:51 MDT." <Pine.ULT.3.91.950829203822.11264A-100000@viking.emcmt.edu>
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> There are a group of students at Montana State University Billings that > are interested in joining the team for developement of the FreeBSD > system. Although we are not Unix gurus I feel that our group could > contribute to the developement of FreeBSD. Any info and guidance would > be greatly appreciated. Well, by all means - dive in! What are you interested in doing? A lot of people ask us what they should do, then look with distaste at whatever we've taken off the top of our TODO list (which sits at the top of /usr/src) and thrown at them and they vanish again. This is clearly sub-optimal and suggests that people don't just want to do _anything_, they want to do something _interesting_! A wholly understandable sentiment, except for the difficult problem of knowing what interests a given individual. I suggest that you guys spend a little time looking through the system and pick something that interests you. Maybe an emulation topic: DOS? Windows? Linux? SCO? The emulation for all of those (especially the first two) needs some serious work and there's even existing sample code scattered throughout the Linux and NetBSD camps that one could use. Or how about an interface topic? We need a "GUI" object library for building nifty system management types of interfaces (adduser/configure disk/build kernel/etc all rolled into one utility) that will work on everything from a vt100 terminal to an X display, but we have no general purpose library for making that easy. Something that a team of motivated students could certainly do, and it'd even be kind of interesting. Somebody like Liant or Inmark might even want to hire you guys afterwards if you do a good job and make your names with it! :-) Or how about an operating systems topic? A VMS logical names mechanism for UNIX? A system for saving and restoring complete process trees to/from disk? Variant symbolic links? An AIX-style volume manager? There's LOTS of stuff to do! Determining what you guys are personally most motivated to do should be the #1 priority, however, since if you pick something that's beyond/below your abilities or just not very interesting then you're not going to do it, all the best intentions in the world aside.. :-) Jordan
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