FreeBSD hacker 101

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

"william wong" <beijing.liangjie at gmail.com> writes:
> Are there any docments or pointers to get me started hacking around my
> 6.3 asap? Building toochains, submitting patches etc.... or i just
> follow most of the conventions in the Linux kernel development
> community?

The toolchain is already in place, no need to build anything.

You'll find our make is different from GNU make.  It may take a while to
get used to it, but when you do, you'll find it much more powerful.

The official channel for patch submissions is send-pr(1), but due to
manpower issues, PRs often get lost in the noise.  Posting the patch to
the appropriate mailing list may be more effective.

Speaking of patches, you should seriously consider upgrading to
RELENG_7, as 6.3 is quite possibly the very last RELENG_6 release, and
patches against 6.3 won't raise much interest from developers.  You'll
find information on how to upgrade in the handbook.

The biggest difference you will notice from Linux is that pretty much
everything, including major kernel subsystems, is documented in man
pages.  If you find something (a library function or system call or
kernel module) that doesn't have a man page, try to track down the
author and prod them - or bitch on freebsd-doc until someone writes a
man page - or write it yourself if you feel up to learning groff (which
isn't for the faint of heart, but you get used to it after a while)

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no