How to start contributing

[Rick Macklem]

Austin Shafer wrote:
> Manav Kumar wrote:
[stuff snipped]
>> And I have shortage of space and computation power, is there any alternative to generate the build without me purchasing new machine.
>
>Honestly you may have to rent the cheapest freebsd instance you can on
>aws/digitalocean/ramnode/whatever and build there. The meta-mode route
>also works but I'm guessing low-end hardware is going to run into
>trouble building llvm if you don't have much RAM. I say give it a go on
>your machine and see what happens.
Yes, a "make buildworld" can be painfully slow, but can finish in a day or
so on pretty well anything with a x86-64 cpu and a few Gbytes of RAM.

However, depending on what you are working, you may rarely need to
do so. Until about 1 year ago, my main FreeBSD development system was
a Pentium4 (x86-32 or i386 in FreeBSD lingo) with 256Mbytes (yes, M, not G)
of RAM and 40Gbytes of disk.
(I never was crazy enough to "make buildworld" om this system,
 but I'm mostly a kernel guy;-)
FreeBSD is rapidly moving away from x86-32, so I would recommend
something that is x86-64 (amd64 in FreeBSD speak).
You can dual boot with Windows or Linux, but installation can be interesting
and a little scary if you don't want to lose the other OS.

--> As noted by Austin BELOW, you can easily build a kernel and you can usually
      build userspace programs individually.
--> When APIs/library changes make a full system upgrade desirable,
       you can just install from an .iso snapshot instead of doing the
      build yourself.
--> If you become a committer, there are beefy build machines that
      you have access to, to do the "universe" build to make sure your patch
     builds on all arches.

20-30Gbytes of disk space should be enough and 50Gbytes is lots, from
my experience.

>If you're only working on kernel stuff, you could just build the kernel
>(which literally any machine is capable of) and install it without
>building world. YMMV

Yes, agreed, as above. 

Good luck with whatever you choose, rick

Just keep in mind people like that you want to contribute, but
absolutely nobody is going to hold your hand and tell you how to do
stuff. You just gotta dive in headfirst and you'll get your legs under
you soon :) Again, the discord is active and people are very helpful there.

Good luck!
        Austin
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