Fellow OpenBSD users, I've noticed a disturbing trend: Very few users are testing patches that developers/contributors are posting.
In OpenBSD, -current is NOT volatile as other projects. So you can grab a a snapshot and start using it right away. Ariane posted a huge diff to drastically reduce the size of ramdisk kernels and got only 1 tester up to now. http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=131669525606850&w=2 Otto Moerbeek posted a diff to improve malloc: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=131537857923062&w=2 and only 2 testers showed up. All of the above diffs require testing on all platforms to make sure that the releases are rock-solid and won't contain bugs that will show up when a user will run the release on his arch. As todd explained it to me once, when a diff gets committed, the developers need to be have some confidence that it works really well. A diff which has not been tested is not going to get merged. However, a diff which has been tested by 5 more people is more trustworthy. I always see the same names testing patches (and it's a small group of dedicated users). I posted a diff for 2 memory leak in sftp (trivial diff), and I didn't get any test reports from OpenBSD users. I ported it to portable OpenSSH, and a Gentoo user tested it ! judging from the volume of mails on misc@, I would tend to think that there are quite a few openbsd users out there. Where did the excitement go ? Where are the adventurous openbsd users who would always run -current, test patches and report bugs ? I met more hardcore users in FreeBSD/Arch/Gentoo group than in openbsd. If we don't shake things up, things will not change ! Running -current and testing diffs _helps_ OpenBSD development significantly. //Logan C-x-C-c -- `` Real men run current !''
