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."

Comments

Impressive

[MetalliQaZ]

Thats not bad for 30 devs and 8 hours. Not bad at all.

Great...how about running it on another arch?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Great...how about running it on another arch?

[TheRaven64]

Have you tried OpenBSD? I know it's had a lot of work done on the VAX port recently, including adding support for some VAXstation framebuffers (this is only in -CURRENT at the moment, but will be included with OpenBSD 4.0, due in a month or so).

Re:Great...how about running it on another arch?

[LizardKing]

Every time there's a NetBSD article on Slashdot, up pops a message about it not working on the Vax. I'm beginning to suspect it's the same individual, as the message is always worded in a very similar way - as a none too subtle attack on NetBSD's cross platform capabilities. Just for the record my Vax, SGI Indy, SparcStation 5 and Dell laptop are all running NetBSD 3.0.1, the most recent release. The Vax previously ran 2.1, 2.0, 1.6.2, and 1.5.3 without problems. Around the time of 2.0 I was actually running it on three different Vax machines (3100 m76, 3100 m80 and 4000 VLC). Never had a single problem installing from CD or running NetBSD.

Now, getting NetBSD running on the last generation of Apple's 12" Powerbook (model 6,8) is a different matter - but I've been unable to get OpenBSD or YellowDog Linux installed on it either ...

Re:Great...how about running it on another arch?

[abs0]

There are two architectures which have compiler issues not present on other NetBSD platforms, vax and pc532. In both cases support is fading away in more recent gcc versions, and they continue to be built using gcc 2.9.5 rather than the gcc 4.1.2 used by the rest of the NetBSD platforms (there are a couple of platforms still finishing testing for the transition from 3.3.3 to 4.1.2).

This means all constructs in MI areas of the kernel (and the entire userland) need to keep compatible with gcc 2.9.5 and cannot take full advantage of newer C syntax and features.

So those working on the vax port tend to have to spend a reasonable amount of their time just making sure everything still builds, which reduces their time available for adding features and fixing PRs.

Its unfortunate, but the alternative would be to have the vast majority of NetBSD platforms stuck on an older compiler, which would hardly be very progressive :)

Having said that the VAX port is run and developed actively by some people, so its most likely the install tools and some models which have issues.

So, yes, VAX (and pc532) are at a disadvantage to the other ports, but they are still far from dead, and I would suggest tuning into the next bugathon to push your pet PRs...

Of course it was a success

[RLiegh]

...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.

Re:What kind of bugs?

[hawicz]

A fair number of those are bugs for other OSes, due to having pkgsrc issues included in the same bug database. pkgsrc runs on a dozen different platforms so the bug database ends up with a lot of issues not directly relevant to NetBSD. Right now, there are 1233 open bugs relating to pkgsrc, many of which are non-NetBSD issues.

As for the classification of other bugs, you can check out http://www.netbsd.org/Gnats/ for a table of how those are distributed. Quite a few are specific to just a single port.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[LandruBek]

I've not looked at the codebase, but the hearsay is that NetBSD has cleaner, nicer code than the other BSDs, and because of that it is supposedly more portable than FreeBSD or OpenBSD.
HTH.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[Billly Gates]

Alot of FreeBSD users such as myself switched to Linux or NetBSD after the 5.x fiasco. All the recent benchmarks put NetBSD higher performance wise than Freebsd. Perhaps 6.x changes this?

Also NetBSD can handle really slow and old hardware well. Its used for embedded appliances like Sony's PSP. It scales well with little overhead.

Science buffs like the BSD's better than Linux because its easier to profile apps as Linux does many more things under the hood. If I had to build an appliance to measure something for my PHD I would chose NetBSD.