How to start contributing

[Rob Wing]

in my limited experience..

it’s nice to work on what interests you, but to some degree you also have
to work on things that committers find of interest and/or find value in -
since ultimately these are the folks that will be bringing your changes in.

While the list linked above may be good start, I’m not sure how up to date
is.

user submitted bug fixes are always welcome, but even some of those have a
tendency to slip through the cracks and sit for awhile before a committer
gets around to bringing them in.

if you submit patches and haven’t received any feedback, don’t be afraid to
ping developers on the patches that you’ve posted for review.

also, get an account on phabricator (reviews.freebsd.org) and post your
code up for review there.

just my two cents

-Rob

On Wednesday, April 21, 2021, Bill Wear <wowear at gmail.com> wrote:

> a good Digital Ocean instance for kernel work is around $48 US,  but it has
> so much usefulness otherwise: it can also be your website, email server,
> news feeder, etc.  it's a good investment in your future.
>
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:54 PM Rick Macklem <rmacklem at uoguelph.ca> wrote:
>
> > 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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