Samuel J. Greear <s...@evilcode.net> wrote: > What has drawn you to use the DragonFly BSD operating system and/or > participate in its development by following this list? Technical > features, methodologies, something about the community?
Thanks all for your responses, this has been very enlightening to me and I hope to others as well. I was somewhat surprised, but perhaps I shouldn't have been, that the community seems to play such a role for so many people. That is largely the reason I am here as well. I have been a FreeBSD user since 1998 and oversaw and maintained several rather large deployments over the years. I was also a developer, but usually a couple of layers above the OS (most often for the web). When I did contribute patches to FreeBSD it almost seemed like a fight to get anything to happen with them, oftentimes they were rejected on the basis of white-space or etc., rather than merit. Whether they were any good or not, well ... I have been following DragonFly BSD since the fork and I have greatly appreciated many of the design decisions that have been made in that time. I have poked around in all of the BSD's kernels and I would consider DragonFly by far the cleanest thanks in large part to the years of cleanup and source documentation work done by Matt. While finding someone to test patches can be a bear sometimes, the community is usually very willing to accept and provide input on odd concepts and alternative ways of doing things. For instance, sfbuf's, although novel have kind of rubbed me the wrong way since the early 2000's. When I finally decided to do something about them quite a few people were eager to offer their own ideas and approaches, explaining DragonFly's unique locking / kernel methodology along the way. lwbuf's have since been committed, I'm not sure I would have had the ambition to follow through and get them committed faced with some of the "obstacles" I have hit in other projects. So a big thanks to all of the recently active committers and contributors on that front, you guys are all low pressure and make things pretty easy. I also get the feeling that DragonFly really is what the developers and users make of it, more than anything. It's not a "toy" project but it's also not necessarily a 100% general-purpose project like FreeBSD aims to be. My personal aim is for it to be a seriously reliable and scalable piece of infrastructure supporting things like clustered web/cloud deployments and clustered/redundant NAS. I don't feel, as a develope/user, like there are any major hurdles to my making changes to DragonFly toward this end apart from my own ambition and the amount of time I am able to contribute. That might seem basic, but it is a very liberating feeling having been involved in various other projects. Thanks again, Sam
