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Note the permission to use LumberCartel Xen howto.

# Hackathon 15

The 15th NetBSD hackathon will be run from August 10th to August 15th.
This time, it's a documentation hackathon ('docathon'), our main
focus is improving the NetBSD documentation and advertising.

Join us on the IRC channel #netbsd-code on freenode (irc.freenode.net).
Just join, have a look around and ask your questions or what work needs to be done.

There's also a thread on netbsd-users, just drop a mail if you're interested.

Additionally, this hackathon will be held parallel to the CCC camp (http://camp.ccc.de).
Some NetBSD people will be there and expressed interest in a meeting.
Mail to the list if you're interested in the meeting, or contact
via Jabber (prng@jabber.in-berlin.de) or in IRCNet/Freenode (nick: gnrp).


## Primary goals

We see four main goals one could achieve within five days with enough manpower:

1. Update and complete the several guides we have.
The NetBSD guide could have some updates (e.g. one could write about npf,
or write one guide for it on its own).
The internals guide has many XXXs in it, too, and the part about regression
testing is factually empty, and perhaps could need one guide on its own.

2. The wiki needs some work on it.
The old wiki needs to be migrated completely into the new one.

3. NetBSD could need some new advertising material. Anyone good in writing
texts can make new texts for the current flyers, and if you're good with
inkscape and scribus, creating one or two posters for exhibitions would be
nice, too.

4. Minor improvements (working on manpages), thinking about versioning the
documentation, address some topics that was not written about before.


## Possible topics

There were several suggestions on what could be done, so here are topics
somebody wanted to be addressed:

### Working on guides
 * Create a list of notebooks and netbooks running NetBSd, what is missing
   with them and what is running. This page could suit well into the wiki
   where it is editable by more people.
 * genfs, fifofs, layerfs and specfs actually have no manpages and nearly no
   documentation. Documenting them would be good for writing new FSs.
 * Look into internals guide. Every chapter (except for five) has XXXs in it
   or misses fundamental information.
 * Regression testing needs to be documented. It has a chapter in the
   internals guide, but I want to stress this topic, as it is important for
   people new to developing with NetBSD.
 * The Xen-howto could be updated (http://www.lumbercartel.ca/library/xen/
   might be a good source).
   LumberCartel has permitted the use of his document,
   don't forget to give credit and backlink to his pages.
 * Write an introduction for people coming from Linux and migrating to
   NetBSD, the main differences to consider, etc.
 * Create an npf guide (similarly to the PF user's guide
   http://openbsd.org/faq/pf/index.html). This doesn't need to be as lengthy
   as the OpenBSD one, but having one would be nice.
   This can also be addressed in the guide's chapter concerning firewalls.
 * The pkgsrc guide could also need updates. Additionally, it would be good
   for people new to pkgsrc if the way make works and how dependencies are
   automatically resolved would be documented in the guide.
   That would make it much easier for people who want to contribute.
 * Write an example on how to migrate NetBSD to a new platform.
 * Gather and actualize bluetooth information. The chapter in the guide could
   be updated.
 * Write an article on how to contribute. At the moment, there is
   http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/, but having a guide on how NetBSD
   development really works, where the code lies and how e.g. the website
   is made (it took me weeks to figure out where the website lies), etc. would
   be good.

### wiki
 * [[Migrate articles from the old user wiki to the new one.|wiki/todo/migrate_content_from_wiki.netbsd.se]]
 * Design a new wiki frontpage and think about how to order the wiki. The old
   user wiki had a pretty nice one.
 * Create a site for 'general tips' related to NetBSD that don't really fit
   into any other category.
 * Think of an easier way for new users (non-developers) to contribute to the
   wiki. At the moment, the way with getting an OpenID, writing a mail,
   waiting for creation and activation is long and difficult.
   One could e.g. think about having a simple NetBSD OpenID-server (SimpleID
   is quite nice for that) and a registration form so that you don't have to
   dig through OpenID first to get an account.

### advertising material
 * Work out posters (potentially A0) for exhibitions. Anybody fond with
   inkscape, scribus and design could do great work on that!
 * Work over the advertising materials, the exiting can be seen here:
   http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/advocacy/.
   They have nice designs, but are fairly outdated and don't really outline
   what NetBSDs benefits are.
 * Design new wallpapers. NetBSD needs nice wallpapers for your desktop. ;)

### miscellanous documentation
 * pcap(3) could need cross-links (e.g. pcap_next and pcap_next_ex).
 * Work over vfs(9) and vnode(9) (some functions missing), and insert them
   into the internals guide.
 * Work through the packages in pkgsrc/x11 and xsrc and document
   correspondences and version numbers there. This is important for working
   on pkgsrc's Xorg.
 * Update the pages for possible projects and bounties, and think of some
   infrastructure on how to make it easily appendable. Currently, there are
   three pages for that issue: http://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/,
   http://wiki-static.aydogan.net/Bounties and
   http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/projects.html.
   I think, merging them all into one with a good table for all would be
   possible, also coming up with new and gathering existing ideas and
   contributing them.