keeping track of local modifications

[Gonzalo Nemmi]

On Sunday 30 November 2008 5:26:07 pm Tim Kientzle wrote:
> Eitan Adler wrote:
> > As an aside can anyone point me to a relatively easy bug/feature that I
> > can work on as a beginner C coder?
>
> There are thousands of such; could you narrow it down
> a little bit?  Are you interested in kernel hacking?
> Device support?  Core libraries?  Networking?  Utilities?
> Porting?
>
> There are a couple of idea pages floating around and
> many discussions in public mailing lists, blogs, and other
> places:
>
> * Search the source code for "TODO" or "XXX" to find
>    comments about things that could use cleaning or
>    improvement.  As a bonus, these usually comment things
>    that someone thinks should be done, so you might have
>    a little easier job selling your solution.
>
> * Search the web for "FreeBSD GSoC" or "FreeBSD Summer of Code"
>    to find ideas that are intended to be 3-month projects
>    targeted at student-level developers.  You'll find links
>    both to past projects (a fair number of which are still
>    not yet entirely completed; maybe you could help?) and
>    web pages and mailing list discussions about possible
>    future projects.
>
> * Search the web for "Junior Kernel Hacker" for other
>    ideas that people have come up with over the years.
>
> * Go to FreeBSD.org and skim the mailing list archives
>    to find ideas and see what problems people are having.
>    hackers@ and current@ are good starting points, some
>    of the more specialized lists can also be interesting
>    reading.  You might find problems that you can solve
>    yourself or you might find an ongoing project that
>    could use a little help.  Projects like FreeBSD work best
>    when there are several people working on any given area.
>
> Of course, how a lot of people get involved is simply
> to install and use FreeBSD for a little while, and find
> something that doesn't seem quite right:
> * a hardware device on your system that's not fully supported?
> * a utility that doesn't work the way you think it should?
> * an application that doesn't run on FreeBSD as well as it
>     does on some other platform?
>
> In my case, I'd used FreeBSD for many years, decided I didn't
> like the installer (still don't, by the way) but found that
> writing a new installer was too big a project for the limited
> time I had available.  So I cast around and found my niche
> working on archiving tools.  (Maybe Ivan Voras is interested
> in having help with his finstall project?)
>
> As you figure it out, it's usually a good idea to ask
> on mailing lists (hackers@ is good) or IRC to see if
> other people are encountering the same problem or if
> someone is already working on something.  That kind of
> discussion can help you get more complete background
> on a particular problem, including approaches that other
> people have tried or even partial code for fixes that
> were never completed.  (There's a lot of interesting
> bits sitting around people's hard drives that are
> worth the effort to study, test, and fix.)
>
> Perhaps most importantly, by talking about your
> work-in-progress, you have a better chance of connecting
> with a committer who will help get your work into the
> tree.  A lot of excellent ideas never make it into
> FreeBSD because the author never talked to anyone
> until they were "done" and the result couldn't really fit
> into FreeBSD correctly without a lot more work.
>
> On this latter point, it can help to read carefully
> through old commit logs, study past work in that area,
> and ask questions specifically of developers who have
> done work in that area.  (Though it's usually better to
> ask first in a public forum like hackers@ or current@;
> individual developers are sometimes very busy or on
> vacation or just slow to respond for various reasons.)
>
> Most importantly, have fun and remember that most of us are
> volunteers who enjoy using and working on FreeBSD in our (often
> quite limited) spare time.  On the one hand, that sometimes
> makes us slow to answer:  If I only have a couple of hours
> a week, I'd usually rather spend it coding than typing
> long answers to questions that people could answer themselves.
> On the other hand, it also means I enjoy talking about FreeBSD
> and sometimes get carried away writing overly-long email
> epics with lots of detail about stuff that noone really
> cares about.  <grin>

Eitan cares and I do too ...
Thanks a lot for your _really_good_ email :)
-- 
Blessings
Gonzalo Nemmi