getting involved and contributing

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday, March 05, 2014 1:40:52 pm Littlefield, Tyler wrote:
> Hello all:
> I had a fewe questions I wanted to ask.
> I'm looking for areas in which I might contribute code (c/c++, Python 
> etc). As I'm new to the code contribution deal, I'd like to start off 
> with something small if possible. My interests are mainly in security 
> and systems development, though I'm probably not all that great at 
> either. Similarly, I had a few questions:
> 1) what is a free or cheap method for testing code, branches etc? I have 
> two systems here, but I am unable to duel boot.
> 2) I could use VMWare for testing, but that limits my ability to do much 
> testing. Given that though, is there a way to automate the install of 
> BSD? Basically: I am blind and am unable to install BSD by myself 
> without help. Solutions exist for serial ports, but I've not really had 
> much great luck connecting to that through a host. If there's a solution 
> for a scripted install, that would be awesome.

If you have a new enough machine running FreeBSD you can use bhyve (or perhaps 
VirtualBox) as a hypervisor and do testing inside guests.  (I do this on my 
laptop now.)  As far as scripted installs: you can write your own install 
script.  The ZFSOnRoot wiki pages actually have a decent set of steps one 
needs to do a manual install.  You can use that as a basis for writing your 
own install script that uses gpart to layout a disk image file, mounts it via 
mdconfig and then untars the dists into the image.

-- 
John Baldwin