Interview with a NetBSD developer: today, Amitai Schlair, aka schmonz@

A few months after Thomas Klausner's interview, please welcome today Amitai, better known as schmonz@.

NetBSDfr: For those of our readers that don't know you, can you introduce
yourself briefly ?

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago. Both at school and at home, my
childhood computing skewed Appleward. The exception was Texas
Instruments graphing calculators. By the end of high school, I had a
nearly complete set.

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BSD Day 2010 in Budapest

This year's BSD-Day has been held in Budapest, Hungary at Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Informatics on November 20, 2010.

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Google Summer of Code 2010 wrap-up report

All six students this year completed their project requirements successfully and on time.

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Interview with Thomas Klausner

The last interview, Christos', is almost 08 months old. For the first interview of this year, Thomas Klausner, also know as wiz@, has accepted to answer NetBSDfr team's our questions.

NetBSDfr: For those of our readers that don't know you, can you introduce
yourself ?
wiz: I'm Thomas Klausner. I've been a NetBSD developer for over ten years
now, focusing mostly on pkgsrc and documentation.
I've founded pkgsrc-wip, a project to get more people actively
involved with packaging for pkgsrc, see pkgsrc-wip.sf.net. Everyone
can get an account there and try out packaging for themselves.
I've also found pkgsrc-security, the pkgsrc security team, responsible
for keeping pkgsrc users informed about security problems with
packages; and pkg-bug-handler, the team responsible for managing incoming
problem reports.

NetBSDfr: How did you discover NetBSD ? How long have you been using it ?
wiz: Friends of mine pointed it out to me; I tried it out, and on the
second try (when one of them helped me setting it up ;) ) stuck with
it. That was around 1998/1999.

NetBSDfr: How did you become a NetBSD developer ?
wiz:I started using pkgsrc and found some problems, or new versions of
packages, about which I sent problem reports. After enough of those,
Hubert Feyrer preferred me to commit them myself :)

NetBSDfr:Do you have an idea of the time you spend working
on the NetBSD project daily, weekly, monthly ?
wiz:It varies quite a bit. Sometimes it's half days at a time, sometimes I
don't get to work actively on it for a few weeks. There were periods
when I spent most of my waking hours on it; nowadays I'd guess about
an hour a day, on average.

NetBSDfr:Can you explain us the role of pkgsrc-pmc, and your role in this
organisation ?
wiz:
I'm a member of the pkgsrc-pmc, the Project Management Committee for
pkgsrc. It currently consists of Alistair Crooks, our fearless leader,
Dieter Baron, Amitai Schlair and myself.

The point of the PMC is to decide in technical issues, when consent
cannot be achieved by the pkgsrc developers, and to handle the pkgsrc
freeze.

NetBSDfr:Can you tell us what lead to the decision of creating the
-wip repository ? Do you have any statistics about the number of
package, overall quality.. ?
wiz:There were two main ideas for creating pkgsrc-wip.
One was that there was no place to collaborate on incomplete packages,
e.g. packages where most of the work was done, but some final steps
were missing, or build problems I couldn't fix where I hoped someone
else could continue instead of starting from scratch.
The other one was to get more people actively involved with pkgsrc.
The barrier for becoming a NetBSD developer is quite high, usually,
and if you just want to work on a few packages, you normally won't
reach it. In pkgsrc-wip you can get access by just sending email to me
with your sourceforge username and can get working on packages right
away; also, your work will be immediately and easily available for
other people.

NetBSDfr:What are the criterion that make a package move from -wip to pkgsrc ?
Who makes the decision ?
wiz:Mainly that it works, passes pkglint and a review by an experienced
developer.
Requests for reviews should be sent to the pkgsrc-wip-review mailing
list. There's no formal procedure in place, so the import step happens
when a developer becomes interested enough in the package.

NetBSDfr:In your professional environment, do you work with
NetBSD ?
wiz:Sadly not. I use it as my main desktop at home though.

NetBSDfr:As a conclusion, can you tell us how you do foresee NetBSD's future ?
wiz:I'm not very good with this kind of questions :)
I see NetBSD as a very high quality operating system with great and
motivated developers, and I think that this is very good base for the
future :)

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Six NetBSD projects choosen for Google Summer of Code 2010

Google's Summer of Code project is intended to involve students in Open Source projects, and we are proud that the following projects are selected for this summer:

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Spend a great "Summer of Code" with NetBSD!

This announcement is for anyone interested to implement a Google Summer of Code project with NetBSD.

April 9th 2010 (19:00 UTC) will be the deadline for student applications.

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Participate in Summer of Code 2010

Taking part in Google's Summer of Code provides a great opportunity for students to get paid to hack on NetBSD, learn about contributing to a major open source project and to become part of an exciting community.

So if you interested in devoting your coding skills as well as your summertime to the improvement of NetBSD, you will find detailed information on the NetBSD Summer-of-Code Projects webpage.

The NetBSD community will appreciate your contribution!

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NetBSD in GSoC 2010

Google has published its list of organizations for this year's Google Summer of Code, and NetBSD has been chosen to benefit this year again (the sixth consecutive year).

If you are a student and don't have plans for the summer yet, head here and pick a project to apply for (or define your own).

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Summer of Code 2009 is on!

For the fifth consecutive year, the NetBSD Project is proud to participate in Google's Summer of Code program as a mentoring organization and we're pleased to announce the list of projects that have been accepted for this summer. This year's selected students include a number of NetBSD developers, returning SoC alumni and a few freshmen. We're very excited to have projects ranging from the areas of filesystems over install automation to userland tools and we expect the entire NetBSD community to benefit tremendously.

In the coming weeks, you will see our students engage the NetBSD community for support with their projects; please give them a warm welcome and help our developers, students and mentors lead all these projects to success!

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