This presentation will detail the reasons, objective, status and roadmap of the EdgeBSD project, which started from the NetBSD codebase earlier this year. It aims at broadening and experimenting around community development around NetBSD thanks to a tentatively more modern development workflow, based on Git.
NetBSD is arguably the first community-based Free/Open Source Software project: it featured a public version control system and mailing-lists back during its inception, 20 years ago. Driven by its very thorough approach to development and technical design, it gained and deserved a reputation of being clean, portable, and simply a cool platform to work and research on.
Over the years, NetBSD received contributions from hundreds of developers, pioneering in areas such as cryptography, host security, networking, and virtualization. However, its rigorous code & member integration process can also be seen as harmful, especially when compared to modern project management and distributed version control systems.
This is where EdgeBSD kicks in. A new member of the family of BSD-based Operating Systems, it is starting development with the current NetBSD codebase and Git for Source Code Management. Package management is based on pkgsrc.
The primary goal of EdgeBSD is to provide an ambitious environment for working as a bigger community on the NetBSD Project. This will be achieved thanks to a more modern development infrastructure, while taking a more aggressive stance on integrating and enabling features (many readily available).
Ultimately, EdgeBSD should be just as fun and attractive as a Research & Development platform while delivering a modern, robust, and industrial-grade system for all ranges of computer devices, thanks to a more versatile and personalized development workflow.
Speakers: Pierre Pronchery