Re: Port help wanted/needed?

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 11:46:28AM -0800, [email protected] wrote:
> Actually, there probably are plenty of places you can help, especially with a strong admin and security background.
> Some things might involve doing builds.  I know you said you were not a coder, but I'm sure you're no stranger to running an automated build or launching a make process to configure, build, and install an application.
> If you are willing to do that, the doors are wide open.
> Many of the ports run behind the i386 port even at the same release number in some areas.  For example, i386 kernels ship with packet filtering and cgd enabled.  Yet those types of things are not enabled, and often of unknown status in many ports.

All very good points. I just wasn't sure if there were areas that folks
were already concentrating where I'd be just wasting my time!

Very true. I'll admit, I haven't run NetBSD as my primary i386 desktop
in a few years now, so I don't know how big the differences are now. I
think it'd be worth it to get it going in a VM and start comparing. I
can start beating on that pretty soon.

> Another area is pkgsrc builds.  Look at what has been done, and see what is needed.  I've been working with the hpcmips port the last year.  Who knew that the mesa OpenGL port actually worked.....until it was tried.

Heh. Good point. I can't say that I've done a meta-pkgs build of gnome
on that thing in the past few years. I've never been able to get it to
complete in the past due to different things. I guess it's time to fire
that back up.
(which, of course, begs the question of who would want to run gnome on a
3/60....)

> Consider also that lack of hardware need not block someone from contributing.  I've had great success using things like GXEMUL and others to run a specific port in an emulator.  I've built the bulk of pkgsrc for hpcmips 4.0 that way.
> I think if you just start "doing" you will find a niche into which you can contribute pretty quickly.  Some of these lists are pretty quiet, but all it takes sometimes is a newbie to wake up some of the old timers.

Right on.. thanks for the pointers. I hadn't started playing with tme
until yesterday since I wasn't sure how stable it was... it's excellent
all around. The nice thing is that I'm pretty familiar with NetBSD due
to prior lives, so diving back in has been a breeze...