Hello! During this year's NetBSD Annual General Meeting on IRC (May 22nd), several participants suggested the activation of some code tutorial sessions performed by the developers.
NetBSD sourcecode is in fact still a mysterious place for the new users, or just for those who read it for the first time. According to the chat, it would be great if some developer could show how they work on the sourcecode, for example with a live session, with any mean: a Youtube live, or even just an IRC live session. This arouse several difficulties: not only as regards the lack of time, but also the difficulties involved in understanding what a developer is doing (some automated operations, with obvious meaning for a skilled developer, are meaningless for someone else). I would like to re-open this discussion and, in particular, I would like to suggest something maybe simpler. Instead of explaining why some portion of code is being updated and how, it would be very useful to show and explain the code just as it is. For example, a volunteer developer could take an important, well known sourcecode file, and explain it line by line; as a starting trivial file, something like src/bin/hostname/hostname.c can be considered, then moving to something more complicated like src/sbin/init/init.c. While I'm sure it's not possible to actually explain every line, the principles used to write the code "that way", to place that function in that point, to call that function with those argument values, could be shown. I believe that some gentle introduction to kernel code would be extremely useful to the whole community, giving anyone more means to craft the code by himself, to improve it, to learn and eventually (why not?) to become a developer. It would be a huge enhancement for an "open-source" community, because the code would not only be available, but also comprehensible. What do you think about it? Would some developer be available for this? Bye! Rocky
