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Re: NetBSD Core liaison

Nathan Myers writes:


On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 03:16:42PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Michael Goetze <mgoetze5@yahoo.com> writes: 
> What we really need here is a contact person... someone willing to go
> to the NetBSD folks, explain to them what it is we want and how it can
> halp what they want. We also need a contact person to organize
> webspace, etc., from the Debian project. 
I think that Matt Green and I might both be willing to help out with
trying to play liaison to the NetBSD side. 

According to my contacts in NetBSD core, Perry and Matt are highly
respected contributors who would be excellent go-betweens. Thank you, Perry, for offering to help.
Excellent. Hopefully someone will be able to do this with FreeBSD, as well. 
Understand, however, that
you're not likely to get universal acclaim from the NetBSD side. Diplomacy is going to be very difficult here, and people are going to have to restrain their impulses to beat "the other" to death 
for not fully agreeing with them at all times.


Of course there are wackos in every large enough group of people.
("Large enough N" often means "N >= 2".) The wackos are a lost cause; and the sensibly pragmatic will be no problem. The only ones we may need help with are with the rest, persuading them 
we are not (as it were) after their precious gum wrappers, and
might even be useful in some odd ways. 
In practice, this may mean the same things "liaison" always means
between development groups -- commenting on and (when they are ready) passing on upstream patches, and clarifying current project status and future plans.
Both sides have their share of wackos. I think that people need to realize that their systems aren't perfect yet. If they were, no one would need to work on them. And there are benefits to just sharing ideas. I recall reading an article by one of the FreeBSD guys, Jordan Hubbard I think, where he said that he likes to keep track of what new things go into Linux. Why not? He might see a good idea. It would be good to have people who are both BSD contributors and Debian developers. 
It might help for you to pass on that the Debian GNU/BSD project
has no intention of relicensing anything. In practice, it is to our benefit for changes to be folded into upstream sources, so it would be foolish to do anything that would interfere with upstream acceptance.
That is already implied in Debian's Social Contract. I would think it should be possible to get someone that is qualified to speak for Debian to say it more specifically. The DPL would be a good person to do that, if he would. 
Currently open questions include NetBSD's plans regarding gcc-3.
In particular, will the kernel be buildable with it soon? If not, we may need to keep a kernel-gcc and kernel-ld for building kernels.
The kernel/gcc issue will probably get resolved soon enough. I wouldn't worry about it now. Debian still has 2.95.4 in woody. After all, Linux has these issues sometimes, too. What might be most useful would be to have someone go through all the BSD Makefiles and replace make with $(MAKE). That would let me build the base system within the Debian environment without messing with PATH. I've observed that this needs doing for FreeBSD, but I don't know about NetBSD. It's a good thing to do, anyway, regardless of Debian/BSD. ---Nathan
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