Why did you choose DragonFly?

[Joel K. Pettersson]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 9:33 PM, Samuel J. Greear <sjg at 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? I suspect the
> HAMMER filesystem to be the popular choice, but what other features
> affect or do you see affecting your day to day life as an
> administrator, developer, or [insert use case here], now or in the
> future?

Many little things have drawn this mostly-lurker here. Personally,
some other BSD (I think NetBSD would be my second choice) or a decent
Linux distro could also fill my needs. For me, DragonFly was/is one of
several alternatives, though the one presently chosen - and likely to
remain so.

I ventured into BSD-land sometime in 2007, trying out FreeBSD (later
also OpenBSD for my laptop, used for some time until I switched it to
DragonFly like the "desktop" computer also running it by that time -
the increase in "responsiveness" on the laptop was dramatic!) until I
later read on the FreeBSD lists some brief discussions about DragonFly
and HAMMER (which I remember was derided at the time as "dillonware"
that would never materialize :P ).

Later - late July of 2008 - I installed DragonFly and tried it out,
and set up a HAMMER partition. I've used DragonFly and HAMMER ever
since, following the development branch with varying regularity - it
both works well and is interesting.

I've never had (nor presently have) the time to really dig into the
code in detail and contribute - the only (small) contribution was
when, already having the idea, I threw myself into the undo utility
code and came up with the patch for giving versions as indexes,
accepted following some cleanup. For that, all that was needed was
looking at the code, thinking for a bit and reading a few man pages -
most contributions, to the un-initiated, would take significantly more
time and effort before you could code them.

Still, it is interesting to follow the developments, even though my
experience is too narrow to understand all the details of many of the
things going on.

-- 
Joel K. Pettersson