NetBSD 2009 Summer of Code projects

The NetBSD project has "gone 2.0" recently, with the launch of a blog and twitter, uhh...channel? I'm not sure what the proper term there is. This was bought to my attention by a blog entry by well-known NetBSD advocate Hubert Feyrer (Deutsch, English).

The most recent entry in the NetBSD blog is about the project's participation in this year's occurrence of Google's Summer of Code. It links to a list of projects, two of which caught my eye.

First up is Lloyd Parkes' "Miniaturise NetBSD" project, which aims to "produce a boot image for a system with no more than 4MB Flash / 16MB RAM, run a useful NetBSD router with DHCP client/server, IPv6 route solicitation/advertisement, PPPoE, and an 802.11a/b/g WPA access point". I like this sort of project in part because I just find small, underpowered systems kind of fun, but also because it guards against bloat and bad design. If it's a straightforward project to strip a system down to those sorts of specifications then it says something about the system's simplicity. I feel like having this sort of anti-bloat guard for NetBSD is particularly important just now because there seems to be a gentle trend away from the project's traditional lean and simple approach lately - putting an unusual web server like bozohttpd into the base system is one obvious symptom of this, and I fear that the recently announced Desktop project might accelerate this trend (although so far their discussions in the mailing lists seem to have been harmless and helpful).

Secondly and even more interestingly is Nhat Minh Le's "XML command-line utilities for NetBSD", which "aims at providing NetBSD with a lightweight, consistent, set of stream-oriented XML utilities, inspired by traditional Unix programs such as grep, join and sed, hopefully opening the way for similar support in other mainstream systems". I am not a huge fan of XML and I much prefer to use formats like CSV, INI and YAML where they're appropriate, but there's no denying that XML is now the de-facto standard format for, well, anything. This standard becomes a whole lot more palatable with equivalents to grep and friends to make working with XML from the command line nice and easy. Furthermore, this project shows that this spirit of Unix is still alive in NetBSD (although, as the project description notes, this isn't really a NetBSD project as such, because these tools will be useful on all platforms), and that makes me very happy.

Changing topic just quickly, in my last entry I mentioned in passing that:

I'm a big fan of reusing HTTP wherever possible because it makes life easier for developers.

I recently dug up the article Why HTTP by Timothy Fitz, which played a strong role in convincing me that this was a sensible stance to take. I don't bring this up now arbitrarily, I want to write some more about it in a later entry, so this is just to get you and I both primed). Until then!