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Updated my personal page.

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# jdf's wiki page

Note: This is not what I'm really working on, it's just a place to gather some 
notes I took about some topics.

## NetBSD flavoured

Currently, NetBSD is a very generic operating system, leaving almost all
choices up to the user. While some consider this a strength, and it
definetly is for people who know what they're doing, it's an obstacle for
people who then have to setup *everything* by hand.

Creating a *NetBSD flavoured* distribution shouldn't be much work, and require 
just minor sysinst modifications.
It shouldn't be much work to just package distribution sets that already
include a list of packages it installs and several preconfigured configuration
files, maybe also some additional wrapper scripts.
On the other hand, you could also add some package calls to sysinst and just 
provide a list of packages you consider necessary.

My original attempt was to create a range of distributions for different 
purposes, i.e. one for developers, one for graphic designers, one for servers, 
etc. I don't know if this is the right way, esp. since some of the applications 
are *very* specific. You cannot really provide a sane server default 
installation except for some basic things like installing a vim, but that's all.
My current idea is to provide just one, maybe named *NetBSD flavoured*, with at 
least the following tools on board:
 * vim
 * pkgin
 * git
 * fossil
 * subversion
 * some other important VCSes
 * light-desktop (i.e., LXDE)
 * screen (tmux is in base)
 * some sane X terminal emulators
 * a browser (Firefox?!)
 * a mailer (Thunderbird? Claws-mail?)
 * emacs (maybe too large?)
 * perl
 * python
 * mplayer (when it's possible to pack it up)
 * pdf viewer
 * preconfigured bozohttpd running on localhost showing documentation

## NetBSD documentation

In [http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-docs/2012/09/20/msg000295.html](this 
post) I shared some ideas about what to do with documentation. Though much of it 
was proven not practical by the replies, I still have one idea: Unify 
documentation of NetBSD, and provide it all on a NetBSD system.

The first step is to merge as much content as possible into the NetBSD wiki. 
Currently, the NetBSD documentation is very diverse in its distribution form.

Then, the Google Code-In produced some nice results, including a CGI for a small 
markdown wiki to browse the wiki (if it was offline), and maybe even a terminal 
markdown browser.

Finally, ship these two in a pkgsrc package or even with base, and provide a 
small script which regularly updates the documentation.

## NetBSD website

Currently, the NetBSD website is written in HTML and Docbook and requires many 
tools to be edited and committed. The final goal should be to have just a small 
homepage with a bit important information, but all the essential technical 
information should be in the wiki. There's also a separate page for this: 
[[htdocs_migration]].

Though the plan is currently to migrate *all* contents to the wiki, I don't 
think this is the way to go. A wiki just doesn't leave a good impression.

## NetBSD community and marketing

Just some thoughts... I think NetBSD has a very bad way of making technical 
ecisions which are counterproductive from a marketing point of view, or just are 
not used for marketing purposes.

The world has changed; nowadays, there's a growing *hacker community* which 
consists of many people with an age below 30. They're just not used to the 
flexibility of the old tools Unix provides, and to the flexibility you have 
with a modern Linux.

There are repeating questions why NetBSD doesn't use git as its primary VCS, but 
rather CVS. CVS *is* indeed a very mighty tool, but many people don't know. They 
like git more because they can explicitly `push` with it (and don't know about 
hooks in CVS or Subversion).
The same holds for many other decisions.

NetBSD has a very... oldish view of how a community should be organised. On the 
one hand, there are the developers, which are coding the project, maintaining 
the website, maintaining packages, maintaining documentation, organising events, 
organising NetBSD itself... and on the other hand, there are the users. They're 
rather consumers than contributors.

The few ones which want to contribute are doing so, and after some time becoming 
developers with the right and possibility to do everything, but there's nothing
in between. There's only few community involvement overall, though there are
many topics which don't require a developer status.
I think breaking with the old habits and providing more community involvement 
and community support is the way to go, but except for starting with a 
user-editable wiki, I don't have many ideas how to do so.

## NetBSD current

The same problem exists imho with the release cycle. The standard release cycle 
of NetBSD is too slow for many people who use it privately (just see how 
wide-distributed Arch Linux got), and tracking current is a rather obscure thing 
with compiling things on your own, etc. ...
And it's not well-documented. There *are* changes, but who knows them? Which was 
the current version where tmux was imported? Etc.

Tracking these changes more centrally, and providing a nice way to install and 
track a current installation would be a great benefit for NetBSD.