"mini roadmap" for userland for 3.7-dev branch

[Justin Sherrill]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 4:15 AM, John Marino <dragonflybsd at marino.st> 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.
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