OpenBSD Hackathon Underway

Triumph The Insult C writes "Aside from some stealth developers, the annual OpenBSD Hackathon, held in Calgary, is underway, according to Theo. They've been doing some recent work on SMP, and have some impressive AMD SMP gear there that they've got to hack around with. A few years ago, it was PF. Who knows what they'll come up with this time that knocks our socks off."

Comments

PF, now...

[Anonymous Coward]

If history repeats itself, it'd be an Apache clone.

it's scary

[ArbitraryConstant]

These hackathons always scare me a bit. Major functionality has a habbit of going from non-existant to solid before it's over.

Re:it's scary

[Anonymous Coward]

From the outside, it always looks as if it's been thrown together at the hackathon. But the developers have repeatedly made comments along the lines of "we'd been discussing this for months/years and had come up with a good design, which we implemented over the last 48 hours".

Good code always comes in about a 10:1 planning:implementing ratio.

Re:A nice installer, after all?

[Anonymous Coward]

i cant emagine an easier installer. i have yet to see a single os that can be installed as fast as openbsd without fast clicking the next and default buttons on some gui POS.

its just that most people dont understand how a hard disk works, and if you cant take the time to learn fdisk and disklabel, you probably wont be able to take the time to learn how to use an operating system without newbie user abstraction. openbsd is free, functional, and secure. i dont think ive ever seen any reference to advancement in mickey mouse hand holding techniques.

put two new users that understand OS concepts in front of a FreeBSD installer and an OpenBSD installer and see who goes from zero to puffy from a floppy before the other guy can start his package extraction.

Re:A nice installer, after all?

[curator_thew]

I actually hope they don't make the installer more user friendly: otherwise we'll have too many supercifical and clueless users coming to use the system. OpenBSD (and NetBSD is a bit like this as well, more in contrast to FreeBSD and Linux) tends to be directed to knowledgable technical users, which goes in tandem with its security ethos. If you like nice installers, try another O/S: OpenBSD isn't reall for you.

I'd much prefer them to be using their time on innovative security features, not pretty installers, SMP, apache-clones, etc. CARP, pf, privsep, etc.

In fact, the OpenBSD guys would probably like it people with good ideas raised them here, and who knows, these ideas may make it into current or future release.

FreeBSD is alive and kicking.

[SphericalCrusher]

Christ. I know this post is offtopic also, but what is the deal and all of these people bashing FreeBSD. I mean... if it's actually dead, new updates wouldn't be coming out, would they? You do know that FreeBSD 4.10 was released recently, don't you? I'm going to be throwing together a computer this summer just for installing FreeBSD on. As long as software has some users and continues to be updated, it's not dead. Hell, Windows 95 isn't even dead yet... it may not be updated any more, but a lot of people still use it.