From: "Bret S. Lambert" <[email protected]>
Or, in short, we need to not deter people straight away, and accept that
perhaps sometimes decent programmers start from ones that make lots
of mistakes.
Perhaps a ports TODO similar to the NetBSD ports TODO might help; it
doesn't require quite the same level of kernel or userspace hacking and
provides very visible feedback and thanks once completed.
But you're also missing a big point: if someone can't figure out what
needs to be fixed, or is incapable of mustering enough motivation to
do the work, then they're not as useful to us as someone who can do
one or the other (or hopefully both).
tedu@ once said that there's an entrance exam to get an account; this
happens to be part of it, IMO.
Sure, and I understand that viewpoint. It's a valid one provided we want the
OpenBSD community to stay as it is.
I tend to think there's an in-between option. If I think back to some of my
earlier coding days, say on OS/2, and omit the coding I did as part of work,
most of it never saw the light of day. Some of it was just me playing around
with code and often I found other ways of achieving the aim that rendered
the
code useless.
I never did (and probably never would at the time) get around to coding
anything serious, but I did port a number of apps - at the time it was
pretty
easy.
Surely people can move on from the low hanging fruit of a port that needs
a ./configure & make install, to minor code or makefile changes, to specific
new functionality to from the scratch coding. Certainly, if at the time
someone
with zero coding knowledge had asked for a port and it was trivial, I would
certainly have done it.
PK
