Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 11:09:28 -0600 From: Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com> To: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> Cc: FreeBSD Chat <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org>, Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za> Subject: Re: FreeBSD: Server or Desktop OS? Message-ID: <3DD91EC8.3040105@centtech.com> References: <20021116232242.S23359-100000@hub.org> <04f801c28e20$0a3665b0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3DD7CF81.7030407@cream.org> <056001c28e60$2af21cf0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <1037560276.1094.19.camel@skalman.campus.luth.se> <3DD7F107.DCE620A6@centtech.com> <a05200f02b9fdb6ba20c2@[213.136.30.47]>
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Brad Knowles wrote: > At 1:41 PM -0600 2002/11/17, Eric Anderson wrote: > >> I said once a long time ago, that FreeBSD needs a group of volunteers >> willing to do their share at finding bugs - this has to be an organized >> group of people, not just a "go ahead and find bugs, no one is stopping >> you" sort of thing. Finding bugs in hardware has the same problems, and >> all developers that have jobs that depend on the quality of the >> product do "verification" on their products. > > > I think a dedicated team of QA people is a good idea. Indeed, Mark > Murray just yesterday (at BSDCon Europe 2002) convinced me that I need > to participate in this kind of process for -CURRENT. I would like to > see this process formalized as an actual project within FreeBSD. Me too.. I'm willing to organize it and get things going.. > I am not a programmer, so I am limited in the number of ways I can > contribute to the project. Amongst almost all multi-person open source > development projects, it has been my experience that there is a serious > "glass ceiling" above the head of anyone who wants to contribute but > doesn't write code. You don't have to be a programmer to run software. You just have to know the end result to expect. > However, I have been doing various types of performance tuning for a > while, and I can usually manage to set up environments where I beat the > hell out of systems (such as I was trying to do for my talk last week at > LISA 2002 and my talk yesterday at BSDCon Europe 2000). I would like to > think I have at least some problem-solving ability, and that I could > provide assistance in finding bugs, and with the help of other people > who can program, we can get these bugs eliminated before the code ships. > > Of course, we'd need to have two teams -- the people who test > -CURRENT before it becomes -STABLE, and the people who test -STABLE > before it becomes -RELEASE. Hopefully, there would be some overlap, and > some people could help test in both environments. I think one team would do it - STABLE testing most of the time, and CURRENT testing prior to a RELEASE. > Myself, I'm going to be testing on a single machine in my basement, > at least for now. It's the only FreeBSD-capable system I have (my > wife's previous laptop, a Compaq Armada 4131T, w/ 48MB of RAM, a > Pentium-133, and a 10GB hard drive upgrade I put in myself). Once the > SPARC and PowerPC efforts come further along, I've also got an ancient > Twinhead Twinstationg 5G (Sun SPPARCstation 5 clone) and an Apple > PowerMac 7200/90 that I could potentially use for testing those > platforms as well. I may be able to run FreeBSD on a handful of machines for testing. If there's enough people to volunteer, I could set up a rack of systems for this kind of work. > I would like to try running these things at least briefly on > 4.6.2-RELEASE (since that's what is installed on that machine now), so > that I can try to isolate the -CURRENT specific issues when I change the > OS. I got a copy of the 4.6 and 4.7 DVDs, one of which has the > -CURRENT-DP1 image, and that will probably be my next jump. After that, > I'll go to -DP2. We can take this off list if need be, but I'd like to hear from anyone interested in doing this. Eric -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Anderson Systems Administrator Centaur Technology Beware the fury of a patient man. ------------------------------------------------------------------ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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