On Fri, 2006-02-03 at 14:59 -0500, Brian A. Seklecki wrote: > On any number of occasions, I've offered personally to donate VMWare > licenses to Net-SNMP developers to help bring *BSD support back into the > mainstream >:}
I don't immediately recall seeing that offer before, and I do appreciate the thought, but I'm not sure whether that would gain us much. I've got access to all three *BSD lines via a multi-boot laptop, and they're all supported on the S/F compile farm as well. Access to systems isn't really the problem. The difficulties wrt improved support for these systems are basically two-fold: a) Experience b) Time While the core developers are reasonably familiar with the SNMP code, we're typically not experts on the detailed internals of all these various operating systems. Which can be a problem, since the agent (in particular) tends to grunge about in fairly low-level (and often poorly documented) areas. For example, on one of the three *BSD systems on my laptop (I think it's the Net-BSD installation), the agent refuses to run, complaining something about "ksym" or similar. This is probably a very simple configuration error, or a missing package or something equally trivial. But I'm not familiar enough with Net-BSD to know how to fix it, or even where to start looking. And I haven't had the time to investigate this more fully. Which is the other problem. For many of us, SNMP development is a part-time activity, which must be fitted around more urgent (and/or paid) work. I've certainly been aware over the last month that there's been much less opportunity for Net-SNMP coding, due to pressures from other commitments - both work and home. So I think we're going to be increasingly reliant on contributions from the wider community - rather than relying on a small core of people to do all of the work. This *is* happening already, of course. There are large chunks of the existing code that have been contributed by a wide variety of people, and more that's just waiting to be verified and included. And the group of active developers is probably larger than it's ever been. But so is the community of people wanting to use the software :-( Maybe I should start being rude to people in the hope they'll go away in a huff? I know that we're not as good about incorporating patches and bug fixes from the trackers as perhaps we should be. But we do try (and I've done a couple of sweeps through both of these over the last month or so). So we do encourage people to continue submitting bugs and patches. But we'd also encourage people to provide feedback about the patches that are already there. If there's a patch that claims to fix a problem, *and* several comments that confirm that it does indeed work - then we're going to be more confident about adding it to the main codebase, as compared to a patch with no further feedback. Such a patch is likely to receive greater scrutiny before we'll accept it - which comes back to the problems of both expertise and time again! Anyway, I've run out of time yet again, so had better stop there. But once again, thanks for the offer (even though I don't need to take you up on it). Such appreciative noises do help! Dave ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. DOWNLOAD SPLUNK! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=103432&bid=230486&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Net-snmp-users mailing list Net-snmp-users@lists.sourceforge.net Please see the following page to unsubscribe or change other options: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/net-snmp-users
