[NYCBSDCon] Fw: NetBSD stuff at NYC*BSDCon

[Isaac (.ike) Levy]

On November 5, 2013 01:03:43 PM EST, "Isaac (.ike) Levy" 
<ike at blackskyresearch.net> wrote:

>
>
> Hi All,
>
> I've been back-forth a bit with Jeff Rizzo of NetBSD, he has a great 
> presentation idea, (I'm really into it at least).
>
> Below are:
> - notes for NetBSD comms
> - a *very* basic outline for a talk about NetBSD RELENG
>
> Best,
> .ike
>
>
>
> ---- Original Message ----
> From: Jeff Rizzo <riz at NetBSD.org>
> To: ike at blackskyresearch.net
> Sent: October 29, 2013 02:09:10 PM EST
> Subject: NetBSD stuff at NYC*BSDCon
>
>
>
> Hi!
>
> Marc Balmer forwarded your email to the NetBSD internal developer list -
> thanks for reaching out.
>
> In the future, you might get wider initial representation within NetBSD
> if you send something to the announcements list:
> netbsd-announce at netbsd.org (moderated, but the moderator is pretty
> quick) is a good place for things like calls for presentations and/or
> just announcing the fact of your con.  You could also choose to post to
> one of the higher-traffic general lists like current-users at netbsd.org
> (probably the single most important for folks tracking NetBSD
> development closely)  or netbsd-users at netbsd.org (a more user-targeted
> list).
>
>
> Anyway, to the business at hand:  I'm located in San Francisco, but I
> was considering coming out for NYC*BSDcon when I heard it might be
> happening.  I'm part of the release engineering team (I spearheaded 2.1,
> 5.2, 6.0 and 6.1, and am currently herding the cats for 7), and could
> put together something about our release process and/or autobuild system
> (which builds all 66 arches up to twice a day at a cluster in NYC,
> actually...) if that would be of interest.
>
> +j
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> NYCBSDCon mailing list
> NYCBSDCon at nycbug.org
> http://www.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/nycbsdcon
>


I was thinking of responding to this NetBSD RELENG talk idea with 
something like what follows,

Thoughts?

Best,
.ike



--
For inspiration, let me take a moment to describe the theme of 
NYC*BSDCON this year, "The BSDs in Production".

Intended Audience (for Speakers):
Along with bringing the BSD community together, this conference aims to 
reach out beyond the *BSD community.  We aim to expose the richness, 
maturity, clarity, and influential nature of BSD UNIX to a wider
technical audience.  This is not manifest as pandering to 'convert' 
Linux users, but instead, to set a tone and example which simply 
exposes the greatness of the BSD family of operating systems.  The 
expected audience may be comprised of Linux and Solaris veterans, as 
well as *BSD people, OS Users and Developers alike.

With that, it's important to keep in mind that your presentation will 
be heard by technical people who may never have actually used BSD UNIX, 
or at least not recently.


Specific to your talk idea, I believe your talk could have excellent 
timing: In a fatty world of "Puppet this" and "Recipie that", and a 
world where fast paced, cutting-edge development often treats RELENG 
procedures as
a chore which "just happens", I think it's highly relevant to expose 
the just how little, and how much, it takes to get the 66 arches of 
NetBSD built daily :)

After some informal discussion here, we think that a Release 
Engineering presentation like this would be excellent for our audience, 
because:
- it shows how the sausage gets made (auditability and accountability)
    - Good for *BSD people!
- it shows a large build process which wasn't invented yesterday
    - Good for exposing new BSD users to 'BSD methodology'
- it shows the realities of what's hard about the problem
    (as well as what's not hard about the problem)
- it exposes the UNIX/base tools necessary to solve the problem
    (which people could ostensibly apply to their other activities with
UNIX systems)

With that, does this kind of approach line up with what you were
thinking about for the talk?
--