

The FreeBSD Foundation Is Soliciting Project Proposals - profquail
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=214834

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jedberg
Ok, I want to _fund_ a project, not propose it. How do I do that?

If someone makes a project that is basically "work with Amazon and FreeBSD to
make FreeBSD a first class citizen on EC2" I would totally put money into
that, and moreso, would use my deep contacts at Amazon to help make the
project a reality.

From what I understand, the technical part of the project is basically making
the kernel and the hypervisor play nice.

~~~
colechristensen
I have a strong feeling that if you simply took the initiative and asked the
foundation, you would get what you want. Of course, per-project funding on a
wide scale gets into a sticky situation where the foundation no longer can
make its own choices and do the right things instead of the popular things.

~~~
jedberg
> Of course, per-project funding on a wide scale gets into a sticky situation
> where the foundation no longer can make its own choices and do the right
> things instead of the popular things.

That's why I haven't asked the foundation directly. :) When I made my annual
donation to them this year I expressed my desire to see FreeBSD on EC2, but I
don't want to start dictating what they should be doing.

~~~
pifflesnort
There's honestly no harm in discussing it. FreeBSD/Xen is already of interest
to base committers, there's existing work done.

If those committers are interested in furthering it via funding -- something
you can only establish by talking to the foundation et al -- then everyone
wins! :)

~~~
jedberg
Ok, you've convinced me.

How do I "talk to the foundation"? ie. What's the best way to bring this up
with them.

~~~
pifflesnort
I'd start with:

board [at] freebsdfoundation.org

and/or

cperciva [at] FreeBSD.org

------
bborud
Make managing FreeBSD not suck?

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pifflesnort
Perhaps you could constructively expand on this?

For the most part, I find managing FreeBSD to be painless, with one glaring
exception I'll get to in a minute. I really love that the base system and the
3rd party packages are iterated separately -- I can have a stable base OS,
while also running modern software.

The problem is the ports system. Building your own software is a nice option
to have, but it's usually just a waste of everyone's time, and it tends to
fail in annoying, new, and magical ways.

Fortunately, we have <https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng> coming down the
pipeline, which solves the problem (finally).

On top of the hassle of _using_ ports, writing ports is a huge hassle of
battling archaic crap. Rather than using destroot, like every other package
manager from the past 15 years, FreeBSD requires the package maintainer to
manually list out each file that will be installed on the target system, and
will fail to properly clean up ports if those file lists are incorrect.

That said, it's not all that much worse than what's necessary to produce a
debian/ubuntu package -- it just could be better.

~~~
bborud
I'd be happy to.

I'm old and grumpy and I just want my computers to work. Even though I did
spend a lot of years hacking more than a dozen different UNIX flavors, it is
close to 15 years since I found the easter-egg hunt of upgrading he OS even
vaguely satisfying.

About a decade ago I discovered Ubuntu. I had just gotten a new ThinkPad and I
needed to install Linux on it. I started the install and went back to hacking.
At the end of the day I checked in my code and I remembered that oh fuck I'm
installing Linux and now it is time to fight with X11 for the rest of the day
in order to get a vaguely acceptable X11 setup. Better call my wife and say
that I'd be spending the rest of the evening at the office swearing at my
computer and using the competition's search engine to look for "X11" and
"ThinkPad".

Except that didn't happen. I touched the keyboard and there was the X11 login
screen. Just like that. Wow.

And Ubuntu just kept getting better over the next years. Until it reached a
point where upgrading it was just a matter of running a few commands and
reboot. Neat.

Of course, some time in 2006 I developed a serious case of suspend-envy and I
ditched Ubuntu for OSX and a MacBook Pro. Imagine that: just being able to
slap your laptop closed, carry it off somewhere, open it and it would just
work. Without me having to spend about one man-week per year trying to make my
laptop not self-destruct by burning its way through my backpack.

Funny that: me growing tired of constantly having to manage the operating
system and fiddle around with the kernel to make my computer stay out of my
way while I am programming.

It took me a good 6 months to get used to all the annoying aspects of using a
Mac to develop software. But you know what: I got to spend more time
programming and less dicking around with the OS so I was happy.

Of course, in 2008 I got the crazy idea that I wanted to store all my photos
on a computer that had a decent filesystem. FreeBSD had ZFS, so while I wasn't
overly fond of FreeBSD, I thought ZFS was worth the hassle. The downside is
that FreeBSD, while a good basic OS, never quite grew up. It is still a pain
in the ass to manage because it is no different from back in the 1990s when I
made a living setting up SunOS machines for the math and chemistry department
at my local university. Or dicking around with Ultrix at the mechanics dept.
Upgrading the OS back then was like performing brain surgery. You needed notes
and you needed to remember all the weird-ass quirks and pitfalls.

The other day I realized that my storage server is running an old version of
FreeBSD and could do with an upgrade. Only I've forgotten the procedure and
when reading up on it I realized that ... boy this sucks ass.

What is mostly annoying is that people think this is okay. It is like having
to listen to people who think that the Model T Ford was the pinnacle of
automotive usability: <http://www.modelt.ca/drive-fs.html>

This is 2013. Excuse me if I don't find manually upgrading operating systems
amusing.

~~~
cperciva
# freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.1-RELEASE

... wait while the new release is downloaded ...

# freebsd-update install

... watch the new kernel get installed ...

# shutdown -r now

... wait while the box reboots ...

# freebsd-update install

... watch the new world get installed

And you're done.

~~~
bborud
right:

    
    
      # freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.1-RELEASE
      Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 3 mirrors found.
      Fetching public key from update5.freebsd.org... failed.
      Fetching public key from update3.freebsd.org... failed.
      Fetching public key from update4.freebsd.org... failed.
      No mirrors remaining, giving up.

~~~
cperciva
Which version of FreeBSD are you running? Usually people get that because
freebsd-update cannot fetch metadata for the release they're running.

~~~
bborud
7.2-STABLE

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cperciva
That's the problem then -- you need to be running a release. The argument
being that if you can get yourself _to_ -STABLE, you're obviously comfortable
with source upgrades.

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emaste
That's certainly fair, although the error message gives no indication of that
and appears to be a problem with the FreeBSD-update infrastructure.

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frankzinger
It should be mentioned that this article is from 2007.

~~~
ari_elle
It is not! "March 27th, 2013, 16:10"

The "Join Date" of the user is 2007

~~~
frankzinger
Doh. Sorry, my mistake.

