On Mon, 11 May 2020 12:00:12 +0200 [email protected] (Torbjörn Granlund) wrote:
> Please consider working on the NetBSD install experience! Now even I, > who is far from a newbie and have tons of patience, consider giving > up. If this had been my first experience with NetBSD, I would have > given up long before I had arrived to ISSUE 5, I'm afraid. I'm not a NetBSD developer so not sure what the current priorities are. I'm sure you raise valid points, I recently went through a similar experience when trying to install NetBSD-9.0 on ARM SBC. The install itself was OK, but there was no good documentation on how to make the install image bootable. Yes the magic command sequence was buried somewhere in the man page and I got help on the mailing list, but the lack of clear instructions on the wiki pages make the first user experience somewhat underwhelming. I don't think this is unique to NetBSD and I've seen similar issues with other open source and commercial software projects. The truth is there is a lot more to good quality software, which people often tend to overlook - robust design, complete unit and integration testing, concise documentation, code reliability and scalability, etc. None of these are particularly exciting, so open source developers tend to focus on those tasks that they find interesting and the boring stuff never gets done. This is also a big problem with commercial software. You have big multi-billion dollar companies that are mainly focused on generating profits. Sometimes there is no effort to invest into a highly skilled team that understand software engineering and can develop bespoke solutions. The approach seems to be - lets get some open source code that maybe could do the job, because it's free, and lets outsource all development to some place where the labour is cheap. NetBSD occasionally sponsor various projects and pay developers to deliver specific features. Maybe one of those features will be a new installer or package manager, depending on how much money they can raise via donations.
