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First NetBSD Bugathon a Success
Daniel de Kok writes "Last weekend the first NetBSD Bugathon weekend was organized by Elad Efrat to handle as many open PRs (problem reports) as possible in a weekend, checking and fixing the bugs that were reported. Although the first Bugathon was not announced widely, it was a success: about 30 developers and 20 users closed around 270 PRs, bringing the number of open PRs down from 4200 to less than 4000.
The next Bugathon will take place on 7-8 October, and NetBSD users and developers are invited to help fixing bugs and handling PRs."
Thats not bad for 30 devs and 8 hours. Not bad at all.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I'm getting tired of the same people who say "fewer bugs" but only really mean "fewer bugs...but only on the x386 or PPC architectures"
The last few versions of NETBSD has been seriously broken on the VAX architecture
(and before you say, "well, YOU Have the source...do something about it!"... I have been trying, but some of the bugs are beyond my abilities)
I would feel much better if NETBSD was just truthful and say "ok, we USED to run on a bunch of different architectures, but we don't anymore"
We keep getting the high-and-mighty "NETBSD runs on 40 different platforms"...NO IT DOES NOT.
It's like saying I speak English, French, Spanish, Russian, and German... my mother tounge is English...I took French in high school. I know a smattering of Spanish from watching TV. I took one year of Russian & German in University.
Realisticly, I only speak English.
Realisticly, NETBSD only runs properly on about ten platforms, not 40
I'm trying to think of funny jokes about the types of bugs you find on a corpse, but they just aren't coming. In seriousness, though, what kind of bugs do the remaining 4,000 comprise? Are these along the lines of translation errors in i18n man pages, or kernel dumps on SCSI RAID systems?
P.S. FreeBSD for the win.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I used to NetBSD on a cobalt qube 2 but honestly I got sick of not being able to do things that I should have been able to do easily.
Now I do OpenBSD on a low power AMD chip and I don't run into those dead ends... "that doesn't work"
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
...bugs thrive on corpses! :p
Seriously, though; glad to see they had a good turn out for it. Hopefully this will put to rest some of the "NetBSD is irrelevent" crap that's been floating around recently. Particularly since most of the hype appears to merely be sour grapes from people who were on the wrong side of a power struggle and are now trying to tear down the project (as opposed to anyone with a valid beef).
30 developers isn't that bad, really. Not up to FreeBSD numbers, certainly; but it's a good start. Particularly given that this event wasn't really publicised in any real way (there was nothing here, or on the front page of netbsd.org about it in advance).
Sidenote to the guy having problems with his VAX: problems with one archetetcture (sp?) don't indicate that NetBSD is becoming x86-centric; they just indicate that maybe -just maybe- -what with NetBSD being contributer oriented and all- that the bugs just might be beyond the -VAX team's abilities as well.
I don't mean to troll, but I'm honestly wondering -- what niche does NetBSD have anymore, really? From all I can see, {Free,Open}BSD have lots more capabilities, and from what I hear, NetBSD doesn't really work on that many archs these days anyway (Linux probably works on more archs, doesn't it?). Is anyone using NetBSD for any good reason and able to tell me why?
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
I've run firefox on 3.0 (and now 4_BETA) pretty much every day, and the last crash I had would have been a couple of months back (I had a dozen or so MB of XML files open and multiple media playing windows).
One thing to definitely test would be your machine's memory. If you can write a CD or floppy image I would strongly suggest downloading memtest from http://www.memtest.org/ and leaving it running overnight.
NetBSD's driver organization is cleaner, not the code. This allows it to be ported to other arches easier. But OpenBSD's setup is almost the same (it did come from NetBSD originally after all), and is quite easy to port to other arches too. Linux and FreeBSD both show their 386-only roots in the rather poor organization and structure of drivers and hardware layers. Which is why you tend not to be able to run alot of off the shelf PCI hardware on sparc64 or alpha with those kernels, even though you can with Net or Open. Linux even re-impliments the same stuff over and over again in different drivers, like parts of the SCSI layer or especially 802.11
How can you mention a programming convention that ends in '-athon' for a project that ends in '-BSD' without giving homage to OpenBSD? Clearly the hackathon concept is a good one and it's great to see other projects implementing it. But let's not forget where this idea originated.
GNAA suspected in death of Rob Levin
Mad Virii (GNAP) Washington, DC - In a baffling move that sent shockwaves throughout the anuses of gay niggers everywhere, federal officials investigating the death of Freenode administrator and posterboy Rob Levin have recently announced clues that seem to assign blame towards the Gay Nigger Association of America.
An announcement of his death was transmitted as a Global Notice across the Freenode network, on September 17 at 06:18 JST:
06:18 -christel(i=christel@freenode/staff/gentoo.christe l)- [Global Notice] On the 12th September Rob Levin, known to many as Freenode's lilo, was hit by a car while riding his bike. He suffered head injuries and passed away in hospital on the 16th. For more information please visit #freenode-announce
"It seems that the bike was impacted by a large pink bus in the shape of a hypodermic phallus," an inside source stated. "Levin's carcass was penetrated anally by the hood ornament, and it took a team of coroners to remove the several gallons of what could only be described as seminal fluid from the victim." EMTs on the scene say Levin's body was covered with open sores.
The GNAA reaction was astonishing. "We have stuck alot of things up Rob Levin's ass in our time, but we maintain innocence," stated GNAA president timecop, fingers crossed."Even when driving a bus up some nigger's ass was fashionable, the GNAA never took part in it."
Later on at the Rob Levin's Death after-party, GNAA member madvirii exclaimed "OH LAWD IZ DAT SUM DEAD FREENODE ADMIN?" and there was liberal lolling.
About Freenode:
Leaderless.
About GNAA:
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If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is NiggerNET, and you can connect to irc.gnaa.us as our official server. Follow this link if you are using an i