Interview with Thomas Klausner

The last interview, Christos', is almost 08 months old. For the first interview of this year, Thomas Klausner, also know as wiz@, has accepted to answer NetBSDfr team's our questions.

NetBSDfr: For those of our readers that don't know you, can you introduce
yourself ?
wiz: I'm Thomas Klausner. I've been a NetBSD developer for over ten years
now, focusing mostly on pkgsrc and documentation.
I've founded pkgsrc-wip, a project to get more people actively
involved with packaging for pkgsrc, see pkgsrc-wip.sf.net. Everyone
can get an account there and try out packaging for themselves.
I've also found pkgsrc-security, the pkgsrc security team, responsible
for keeping pkgsrc users informed about security problems with
packages; and pkg-bug-handler, the team responsible for managing incoming
problem reports.

NetBSDfr: How did you discover NetBSD ? How long have you been using it ?
wiz: Friends of mine pointed it out to me; I tried it out, and on the
second try (when one of them helped me setting it up ;) ) stuck with
it. That was around 1998/1999.

NetBSDfr: How did you become a NetBSD developer ?
wiz:I started using pkgsrc and found some problems, or new versions of
packages, about which I sent problem reports. After enough of those,
Hubert Feyrer preferred me to commit them myself :)

NetBSDfr:Do you have an idea of the time you spend working
on the NetBSD project daily, weekly, monthly ?
wiz:It varies quite a bit. Sometimes it's half days at a time, sometimes I
don't get to work actively on it for a few weeks. There were periods
when I spent most of my waking hours on it; nowadays I'd guess about
an hour a day, on average.

NetBSDfr:Can you explain us the role of pkgsrc-pmc, and your role in this
organisation ?
wiz:
I'm a member of the pkgsrc-pmc, the Project Management Committee for
pkgsrc. It currently consists of Alistair Crooks, our fearless leader,
Dieter Baron, Amitai Schlair and myself.

The point of the PMC is to decide in technical issues, when consent
cannot be achieved by the pkgsrc developers, and to handle the pkgsrc
freeze.

NetBSDfr:Can you tell us what lead to the decision of creating the
-wip repository ? Do you have any statistics about the number of
package, overall quality.. ?
wiz:There were two main ideas for creating pkgsrc-wip.
One was that there was no place to collaborate on incomplete packages,
e.g. packages where most of the work was done, but some final steps
were missing, or build problems I couldn't fix where I hoped someone
else could continue instead of starting from scratch.
The other one was to get more people actively involved with pkgsrc.
The barrier for becoming a NetBSD developer is quite high, usually,
and if you just want to work on a few packages, you normally won't
reach it. In pkgsrc-wip you can get access by just sending email to me
with your sourceforge username and can get working on packages right
away; also, your work will be immediately and easily available for
other people.

NetBSDfr:What are the criterion that make a package move from -wip to pkgsrc ?
Who makes the decision ?
wiz:Mainly that it works, passes pkglint and a review by an experienced
developer.
Requests for reviews should be sent to the pkgsrc-wip-review mailing
list. There's no formal procedure in place, so the import step happens
when a developer becomes interested enough in the package.

NetBSDfr:In your professional environment, do you work with
NetBSD ?
wiz:Sadly not. I use it as my main desktop at home though.

NetBSDfr:As a conclusion, can you tell us how you do foresee NetBSD's future ?
wiz:I'm not very good with this kind of questions :)
I see NetBSD as a very high quality operating system with great and
motivated developers, and I think that this is very good base for the
future :)