On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 4:15 AM, John Marino <[email protected]> wrote:
> > A large percentage of that IRC traffic are from folks that don't > contribute code. Speaking for myself of course, I judge activity first > on the number of active committers, then on the frequency and content of > commits. Intuitively I'd say we rank about 10% compared to NetBSD which > is about 50% of FreeBSD, and that's just kernel + userland, I'm not > including ports/pkgsrc only commits. Mailing list traffic was from non-contributors (non-committers might be a better phrase), so it's a wash. I think the proportions aren't as high as you are saying; since I've been doing the In Other BSDs features on the Digest, I've noticed a certain amount of the commits for other BSDs are basically architecture-specific commits. We're i386/x86_64 only (and dropping i386 sooner or later), so there's a difference. > So by those estimates we're getting by with 5% of the manpower of > FreeBSD, which also means that any resignation will have a huge impact. > The one thing that DragonFly is terrible about is recruiting and that > should change. > My gut feeling is that we aren't doing too badly; compared to any other group without corporate sponsorship, we're pretty active. Most operating system projects tend to be one-man shows. I suppose in the long run, this sort of comparison doesn't matter, cause nobody will ever say, "oh, that's enough volunteers. We don't need more" - but we are doing well. I'd point at our repeated success with Summer of Code as an example. > > - Freshports adapted to dports. > > Freshports is overkill, all we need is a visual catalog describing the > ports and its relationships, home page. The actual commit history is > not pertinent. I believe Joris already started on something like this. > > Also this is project infrastructure (not a DragonFly OS or first) > > I think it's a pretty convincing argument that there's entire companies built around infrastructure - the Linux kernel is the Linux kernel, but Suse and Redhat and Ubuntu all exist to basically provide that infrastructure. We're wandering pretty far into off-topic opinionland, but that's OK.
