Date: Mon, 8 May 2000 14:39:15 +0100 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> Cc: hm@hcs.de, committers@FreeBSD.org, questions@freebsd.org Subject: Summarising the lists (was Re: Poll tally so far:) Message-ID: <20000508143914.A48401@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <11341.957778655@localhost>; from jkh@zippy.cdrom.com on Mon, May 08, 2000 at 02:37:35AM -0700 References: <20000508071950.4815F4813@hcswork.hcs.de> <11341.957778655@localhost>
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[ I'm cc'ing this to -questions to get a wider audience for a point further
down. If you see this on -questions and want to get involved, please
reply directly to nik@freebsd.org to register an interest. I've set
reply-to appropriately. Of course, if you're reading this on -committers
then you probably want to ignore my reply-to, and just send it back to the
list. ]
[ And a plea to the postmaster -- can the crossposting limits be disabled
for @freebsd.org addresses, on the assumption that on the rare cases when
we want to send something to more than three lists we have weighed up the
pros and cons, and decided it is on topic for them? I'd have liked to
send most of this message to pretty much all the lists. ]
On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 02:37:35AM -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> > Have a "committer of the month" page on www.freebsd.org or whatever else,
> > let code only in the tree (= get a reward) in case there is sufficient
> > documentation available (= you have to do something first) or, or, or.
> > There is much one could do if one wants to.
>
> Not a bad idea at all, do you think someone on the docs team (since
> their talents run more in the direction of crafting web page material)
> would be up for volunteering to do this? It's obviously going to take
> a little work to create and maintain such incentives.
"Committer of the month"? <boggle> Are you cutting your crack with
talcum powder again?
And while I'd be all for removing someone's commit bit if they commit
stuff without associated documentation, we all know that that's not going
to happen any time soon.
However (and this is where everyone who's reading this on -questions comes
in) I'd be all for someone reading -hackers or -current, or -arch (or
any of the other lists for that matter) and producing a weekly edited
digest of the discussions. A web search for "kernel traffic" will show
up what someone over on the Linux kernel development list did, and it's
a good idea. All we need is someone with the spare time to actually do
it.
Note that you don't need to be a kernel hacker to do this. For that matter,
you don't need to be the world's best writer. All you need to do is spend
(maybe) an hour a week summarising discussions on a mailing list.
For example, glancing over at the -stable list this week, you might start
with:
Mark Powell kicked off a long discussion about FreeBSD's RAID support,
now that the DPT SmartRaid IV controllers are obsolete. He asked
"What's the best bet for hardware RAID under FreeBSD?", and thought
the AMI controllers were a good place to start.
Eighty+ replies later (most of which dealt with the minutae of
firmware), the Mylex controller emerged as a narrow favourite,
largely due to bugs in the AMI driver which aren't going to be fixed
for another month or so.
Brad Knowles mentioned his figures that showed software RAID (Vinum,
plus a bunch of normal SCSI controllers and disks) beating the pants
of hardware RAID. Of course, that still depends on your application
mix, how configurable you want things to be, and what level of
reliability you want.
[xxx] bought up the issue of sizing the root partition, particularly
when you want to get crash dumps from kernels with debugging symbols.
A variety of opinions were offered, but. . .
Get the gist? You'd probably need to include links to the original messages
in the mail archive, and to anything else that might be useful in context
(like, say, the AMI and Mylex websites in the example above), but that's
about it.
If you're looking for an easy way to contribute to FreeBSD, that's it. Do
this and you will
1. See it reposted across a few mailing lists.
2. See it reposted to the newsgroup.
3. See it included, and linked to, on the web site.
4. See it mentioned in the Slashdot BSD section.
5. See it mentioned in Daily DaemonNews.
You can't buy that sort of fame :-)
Do it consistently (say, 4 times over a 1 month period) and I'll personally
be banging on -core's door (or whatever we have by then) to get you commit
access so you can maintain the web page side of things yourself.
Sound fair?
If this is the sort of thing you think you can do, drop me a line,
including the mailing list(s) you want to monitor. I'll co-ordinate things
so that we don't end up with three different people all writing a summary
of one mailing list, and then we'll see where we go from there.
N
--
Internet connection, $19.95 a month. Computer, $799.95. Modem, $149.95.
Telephone line, $24.95 a month. Software, free. USENET transmission,
hundreds if not thousands of dollars. Thinking before posting, priceless.
Somethings in life you can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard.
-- Graham Reed, in the Scary Devil Monastery
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