Submitted by The second NetBSD Bugathon was even more successful than the first: three times as much people (both users and developers) showed up, and together they fixed more than 300 PR’s on two days. See Elad’s report and the Bugathon’s homepage for the details.
Looks like NetBSD is being a trend setter here:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2006-October/03587…
300 PR’s on two days? wow, that’s quite amazing!!
keep up the good work, NeBSD team.
I remember about a month ago that a prominent NetBSD developer left the project and gave a very critical condemnation of the current direct of the project. Since then, I have seen more positive NetBSD articles on OSAlert then I can remember. I can only wonder if this is damage control by the NetBSD team.
No, it is not damage control. The idea for an event has been boiling for a longer time, but the downside is that the NetBSD project is geographically diverse with developers from all over the world. So, the idea of a net-hosted bugathon came up spontaneously as a reaction to that problem. Elad contributed a lot of time and enthousiasm to get this started, and it has snowballed.
Please remember that, although one developer gave his critique of the NetBSD Project, that this is just one developer out of more than three hundred. Friction happens in large projects.
Besides that we have always tried to avoid hyping, we are only interested in publishing news when something newsworthy has happened (as you can see on our changes pages[1]).
NetBSD is not dying, it is alive and kicking, as it always was.
[1] http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/
Edited 2006-10-09 21:26
danieldk,
Please don’t take my comments as negative. Since when do one see much about NetBSD? The fact is, you don’t. They don’t have a large user base like FreeBSD, media darling derivative distributions like PC-BSD and DesktopBSD, nor do they have an outspoken lead developer (Theo de Raadt). All of the good things that NetBSD have done in the past have flown under the radar. The one major story was the disgruntled developer. I don’t think there is anything wrong with the NetBSD team (or their loyal users) getting the word out about their product. It is hardly hype when you report what has actually happened (the bugathon, package management upgrade, etc.). As for the bugathon, Debian has bug squashing parties, OpenBSD has hackathons, the fact is that gatherings such as these are quite common and no doubt useful. It only makes sense that the NetBSD team would make this a practice of the development process. Sorry for any problems my earlier post might have caused.
How is threading progressing in NetBSD? I believe that FreeBSD attempted to implement M:N threading but failed and is now moving towards 1:1. Sun tried to do it before FreeBSD attemped it but also failed. Linux devs did not even try to do it siting the complexity. However, NetBSD is now trying to go where others failed. Is there progress in removing Giant Lock? How is this coming along when compared to FreeBSD?
Pardon me for possibly missing out on progress of the teams here, but I didn’t think FreeBSD completely dropped the M:N model, they rather develop in parallell?
Maybe I’m mistaken here but I thought that was the case, just like with the schedulers? (ULE/KSE).
Either way, I’d be delighted to hear about any NetBSD attempt on this, would, if even half successful bring a possibly brilliant newsitem to Osnews =).
Oh, and finally, if someone could clear up my mental mess with what FreeBSD is trying to do I’d be delighted.
“Pardon me for possibly missing out on progress of the teams here, but I didn’t think FreeBSD completely dropped the M:N model, they rather develop in parallell”
Don’t take this as an authoritative answer. IMHO, while they have not abandoned M:N threading, the new push is to get 1:1 working and working fast. In fact, there was a major discussion on the list a few months ago regarding this and it looks like FreeBSD 7 will by default use 1:1 (libthread) rather than M:N (libpthread). However, because of the pluggable nature of threading for FreeBSD, development of M:N threading will go on in the background by a few developers, especially since it seems they are rather adamant of using M:N.