about:NetBSD

My involvement with NetBSD is:

• NetBSD developer since October 23, 1996.
• Member of the Core team from August 26, 1999 to August 3, 2005.
• NetBSD Foundation director from September 12, 2002 to January 15, 2005.
• NetBSD Foundation Vice President and Secretary from February 10, 2004 to January 15, 2005.

You may email me at the project as <lukem@NetBSD.org>, if you wish.

features I added

• build.sh - NetBSD cross-build infrastructure. Paper available here. Build improvements such as MAKEVERBOSE. This included enhancing various tools to make it easier to cross build NetBSD releases from other platforms and architectures as unprivileged users.
• db - Manipulate db(3)'s btree(3) and hash(3) databases.
• _DIAGASSERT() - Argument sanity checks to most of the functions in the system libraries.
• getent - Get entries from administrative databases (e.g, passwd(5), group(5), ...).
• installboot - Machine-independent installation of disk bootstrap software.
• makefs - Create a file system image from a directory tree.
• nsswitch - Name service switch. The current design supports static (compiled in) database methods and optional use of dynamically loaded modules, There are possible future plans for an nscd daemon. (This is now present in FreeBSD as well.)
• rc.d - NetBSD /etc/rc.d startup and shutdown mechanism. Paper available here. (This is now present in FreeBSD as well.)
• postinstall - Automatic configuration upgrade framework.
• /rescue - Converting the system to be fully dynamic (including /bin and /sbin), and providing rescue tools in /rescue in case the shared linker or a shared library is corrupted. (This is now present in FreeBSD as well.)
• src/x11 - A "shadow" tree of BSD makefiles that allow the XFree86 4.4 xsrc distribution to be cross-compiled without the use of Imake. (Formerly known as "Imakeicide-II".)

other enhancements

• A lot of documentation speling, tpyographical, and consistency fixes and enhancements, including man and web pages.
• Cleaned up most of the userland code to compile cleanly with gcc -Wall -Werror -W...; the so-called grand WARNSification project.
• config - Added the "no" keyword.
• dump - Support dumping subsets of filesystems.
• /etc/security - Backup text copies of disklabels and check nightly.
• finger - Mail status reporting, show hosts in short listing.
• ftp - Progress bar, interactive status reports, variable sized hash marks, SIGINFO support, enhanced mget confirmations, context sensitive filename and command completion, auto-fetching of FTP and HTTP URLs (including via proxies), etc... This is available in a portable version as tnftp.
• ftpd - ftpd.conf support, providing class control of automatic conversion, display and/or notification of files when a directory is entered, control of whether certain commands are enabled, compliance to RFCs 959, 1123 and 2389, etc... This is available in a portable version as tnftpd.
• libedit - Add an 'edit on|off' editrc command to advise invoking programs if a user wants editline support. Wrote the manual pages.
• Makefiles - Many features and overhaul, including: added support for MKxxx=no, which replaces NOxxx=, because the former can be overridden on the command-line to make; added support for MKCATPAGES=no (prevent formatted man pages from being built or installed); MKSHARE=no (prevents files that would be installed under /usr/share from being built or installed).
• mtree - Improved "absolute-path" format format, tagged keywords.
• netinet - Change the range of ephemeral ports from 1024..5000 to 49152..65535 as per IANA's Assigned Ports document.
• netstart - Take advantage of a feature in 4.4BSD, and remove the need to explicitly add a route from an interface to lo0.
• nvi - Implemented expandtab.
• restore - Allow multiple concurrent restores of filesystems dumped at the same time.
• route - Added -f to flush routes before executing given command.
• ypbind - Support binding to specific servers.
• Incorporating various file system usability and performance enhancements such as resizing file systems, from other sources (such as FreeBSD).

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Author: Luke Mewburn <Luke@Mewburn.net>
Copyright © 1998-2024 Luke Mewburn.