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by jeamland 3427 days ago
Hi, I'm the guy who wrote and presented the original piece.

None of it was meant to discourage you from using FreeBSD. I had nothing to do with the LWN summary but the whole point of the piece was to look at what FreeBSD could be doing better from a community standpoint.

1 comments

You do let useful contributions slip through the cracks from time to time.

A case in point: Baptiste Daroussin wrote up documentation for EVFILT_FS in kevent. FreeBSD actually has had this for a decade, not that one would know it from the doco (because contrary to the norm the code was patched without amending the doco to match). This was in 2010. The doco patch was never actually added.

* https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Sep...

Pretty sure every project does but in our case that's the problem with having a large project. Did the doc change happen or should I chase Baptiste?
Also the "surface" the community sees is not very inviting. Bugzilla is horrible to use, browsing it gives you the strong impression it is abandoned. The wiki is also always outdated, or you can't tell. The forums are a nice addition, but they are only visited by beginners, devs or advanced users don't wanna go there. GitHub pull requests are ignored, because we still sit on SVN (and lol perforce - is that still around?).

Don't get me wrong, I love FreeBSD, but some of the effort and friction is unnecessary.

Nonetheless, it's one thing that you could do better; and that's what you said that you wanted to look at. There's a long tail of small useful contributions -- even from the people with the FreeBSD.org mailboxes (-: -- that simply don't make it.

There's nothing about EVFILT_FS in the 11.0 kqueue() manual.