Documentation for setup development environment

[silvioviscuso]

Hi, @pkgdemon
I'd like to start contributing and provide significant help, especially with the operating system's front-end. Could you add a docs folder to the root folder with all the technical documentation, including instructions for development mode? Thanks.

[pkgdemon]

Hi, @pkgdemon I'd like to start contributing and provide significant help, especially with the operating system's front-end. Could you add a docs folder to the root folder with all the technical documentation, including instructions for development mode? Thanks.

At the moment everything is designed to built in GitHub only via PR's, automated testing that gates regressions. This is enabled by cross building every project on native GitHub runners vs using virtual machines with freebsd or slow emulation. It's a bit complicated but it enables rebuilds of granular components like the kernel in minutes vs hours. I do plan to support local building workflows, which I will outline a little bit below under next steps. At that time I will definitely be more ready to have in place developer documentation, etc. It's going to take a bit longer for me to scaffold all that to really be contributing ready.

My next steps in no particluar order:

• Getting this up to snuff https://github.com/pkgdemon/gershwin-on-nextbsd

• Getting ARM64 images working

• Local building support on NextBSD, FreeBSD, macOS, Linux (all the same effort) this is where developer docs start to come in (I will make something as easy as this other build system I put together https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-developer)

I'll try to outline the larger vision a little bit with various ideas I have been incubating over the years:

• A superset of FreeBSD with mach + IOKit +kextd + launchd + configd + IPconfiguration + ASL with syslogd integration, mDNSResponder baked in (this needs polish but is in place mostly)
• Coming later new wifid solution based on open source supplicant stack from Darwin, securityd (keychain), bluetooth solution written from the ground up
• Rapid porting of kid's to kernel extensions
• Gershwin Desktop environment will the focus with a native display manager for NextBSD itself https://pkgdemon.github.io/WindowServer-Plan.html?v=20260514 (work in progress I have been contributing upstream to GNUstep for some time on libs-opal, libs-back and I have a libs-quartzcore PR in progress)
• Application bundles and jails containers via GitHub - an older prototype example idea here for Application Bundles https://marketstep.github.io/
• Native solution for "Safari" WebKit/WebKit@main...pkgdemon:WebKit:main (Work in progress)
• An enhanced server managed focus based on other work I have done like this https://www.hexbsd.org which was an earlier effort that I started that I could do better by having more control for integrations via NextBSD
• Another possibility was a revamped FreeNAS Corral though I am not sure how soon I'll want to work on that again if at all in the near term with primarily Gershwin holding most of my interest https://github.com/cowsurgery

So these are most of the various ideas that I would like to use NextBSD as a vehicle for. At this time I would time Gershwin is more primed towards contributing and it already has several regular contributors and is grown to be something highly active even while I focus more on NextBSD given all the help I have now. I'll need a bit more time to get NextBSD in a better position, but I'll definitely keep your suggestions in mind, and try to get to this sooner rather than later. Thanks for the interest!