Re: GSOC project

[Alex Hornung <ahornung@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Robert,

On 21/03/12 00:18, Robert David wrote:
> I'm new to DragonFly, but I like the ideas you provide for
> enhancements. There seems to be many tasks I'm interested, but I dont
> know I can handle a lot of them, because I dont know DragonFlyBSD (*BSD)
> kernel so much just now. 

if you want to learn about DragonFly, I suggest you just grab an ISO,
install it (a VM will do) and just browse around. If you are really keen
you could submit a patch or two for some of the bugs on the bugtracker.


> As there are more ideas to improve in your list, maybe you as a
> developers has some priority list what is more and what less important.

It is not so much about what we feel is important, but about your
proposal. If your proposal is great, you got good chances to get a slot
even for a project someone might consider less relevant.


> From the things that seems reasonable for me and my experiences are:
>  - Improve compatibility of libdevattr with Linux' libudev

I'd certainly welcome that - but beware that there's more work to be
done here than might appear at a first glance. In particular regarding
sysfs - I'm not sure how much software benefits from libudev without
explicit use of sysfs. If most also use sysfs, this project might evolve
rapidly into a partial sysfs implementation (maybe even as a userland fs
using puffs/fuse and an expanded libdevattr?)


>  - Port FreeBSD's USB stack to DragonFly

While a lot of us feel that it would be great to have FreeBSD's USB
stack, I'm not quite convinced it's a good gsoc project.


>  - Adapt pkgsrc to create a package system with dependency independence.

A proper package system for pkgsrc would certainly be great. If you are
interested in this, I suggest you discuss this further on the mailing
lists and dive into how pkgsrc works by simply using DragonFly for a while.


HTH,
Alex