*BSD News Article 33029


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From: sja@snakemail.hut.fi (Sakari Jalovaara)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: I hope this won't ignite a major flame war, but I've got to know!
Date: 20 Jul 94 15:17:47 GMT
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 32
Distribution: inet
Message-ID: <SJA.94Jul20171747@gamma.hut.fi>
References: <30fhpn$968@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <1994Jul19.143013.28119@cs.cornell.edu> <30h8kt$fcv@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <1994Jul20.040243.5860@cs.cornell.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: gamma.hut.fi
In-reply-to: mdw@cs.cornell.edu's message of Wed, 20 Jul 1994 04:02:43 GMT

> Can J. Random User really _directly_ contribute to the [*BSD]
> project? How much red tape does it require, if so?

My experience in contributing fixes to *BSD:

I found a bug in a program.
I fixed it.
I sent a diff to the maintainer.
He sent me email the next day saying "thanks, the fix looks correct,
I'll put it in."

How else could it possibly work?

Depends on what you consider "red tape."

> A quick scan of the comp.os.386bsd.* newsgroups (which are now defunct,
> for all I know) doesn't yield dozens of announcements of new software or
> patches as the Linux newsgroups do.

NetBSD and FreeBSD are BSD and Posix compatible.  Most stuff out there
that runs under UNIX (SunOS, AIX, whatnot) runs fine under *BSD.
If you write Linux code that is portable (and why not?!), that should
work under *BSD as well.

BSD patch announcements are on the *BSD mailing lists.  Yesterday's
patch announcement for NetBSD (called "daily CVS update output")
lists 13 modified files with modifications to the MS-DOS and CD ROM(?)
file system code.  Monday's was 17 files to Amiga and HP stuff, find(1)
and a bunch of miscellanea.

To subscribe to the *BSD mailing lists, see the *BSD FAQs.
									++sja