Third NetBSD Hackathon Summary

jschauma writes, "The third NetBSD Hackathon was held on Saturday and Sunday, November 25th and 26th, 2006. NetBSD users and developers met on IRC to prepare NetBSD for the upcoming re-branching of NetBSD 4.0. Approximately thirty NetBSD developers and more than 140 NetBSD users joined in on the two days, paying particular attention to improving install documentation and ensuring build stability. A Wiki page as a TODO list was used for the first time, an approach that is likely to be used in future hackathons. All in all, over 200 bugs have been worked on in those two days and while not all of the critical showstoppers could be fixed, valuable progress was made in identifying root causes."

Comments

Re:Nice to see Wiki software used

[TCM]

Open Source pet-peeve: using a wiki for documentation. Expecting the users (the oh-so-often-spoken-of "community") to write your documentation for you is lazy.

I'm with you. There's nothing worse than projects who seem to have no design plan and just code ahead. Documentation is lacking and you have users guessing about the features. Most prominent example in my eyes is Asterisk.

Fortunately, wikis were used for this event only. I can understand that they wanted to have a process that allows for fast changes when doing such events.

Normally, NetBSD documentation is first class, be it man pages or documentation on their homepage. It's one of the few Open Source systems that properly documents everything. The whole NetBSD homepage is managed with CVS and written using DocBook I think. AFAIK they need to checkin to CVS and rebuild the relevant parts of their homepage with a "make" to change anything.

So for an event that lasts 3 days and where people need a rapidly changing status overview, the usual documentation progress probably was too slow.