Submitted by NetBSD held a public ‘Bugathon’ this weekend: developers and users gathered together on a public IRC channel where they discussed and fixed a lot of PR’s (270 bugs closed in just two days). It was such a success that the NetBSD developers plan to organize such event regularly. There’s also a website (still under construction).
I am so impressed! Awesome!
Things kind of bugathon’s and hackathons always seem to be a lot of success, or rather you always hear about them being a success. I remember Theo from OpenBSD always said that at the Hackathons the OpenBSD people always got a ton of work done. Maybe NetBSD needs to setup a OpenBSD style hackathon?
At work, we have monthly product/platform releases. At the end of each month, people will major/important pieces going out come in at night to prepare for any possible issues, so they can be fixed. So a bunch of people are in the office from like 12 until 4/5/6/7 fixing bugs. It’s kind of fun, for me, so I can see how this type of thing on a grander scale would work out well.
This kind of thing would really improve the *BSD’s image in general — there is nothing worse then people saying ‘BSD sucks because (insert favourite PR’ed annoyance)’.
Afaik OpenBSD has been doing this for years. The problem is that they are now very insistently asking (I’d not say demaning… yet) for money in order to finance those hackatons.
Edited 2006-09-25 21:55
The NetBSD Bugathons take place on IRC. So, it does not cost anything to host the Bugathons, besides some time from people to spend on PRs.
To meet the recent charges against NetBSD, they need to clarify what NetBSD is. We know what NetBSD was 5-10 years ago… but what is it in today’s world of DragonFlyBSD and OpenSolaris.
* netbsd used to be the “clean” OS but the code quality of opensolaris and minix is excellent.
* netbsd used to be portable – linux is now very fairly portable and i guess other OSes like minix, qnx and so on can be ported to mmu-less devices and yet provide some sort of posix compatibility.
* netbsd used to be an innovator – they did an excellent driver framework and their USB code is a good example. linux took a few takes to get it right. they used to forge ahead with IPSEC/KAME but that was more than 5 years ago. but what was the last area that netbsd innovated on? today OpenBSD is forging ahead with free wireless drivers…
I’m asking because I do want netbsd to succeed – i just don’t know at what!
NetBSD had nothing to do with KAME, KAME was a project done by a series of 7 Japanese companies – the goal was IPSec and IPv6 for all the BSDs with BSD licence, the goal was accomplished and the project folded upon completion. NetBSD just merged in KAME code, like FreeBSD did, and OpenBSD did for IPv6 (though not IPSec, since they did their own before that).
The Linux kernel can benefit from a contest like this. Linus and other devs have commented on the increasing number of bugs found in the Linux kernel and how there are long standing bugs that complicate legacy hardware support.