NiceBSD Dev Diary 2015-03-16

Currently making a map of the source code of Mezzano, mostly for my sake, though I’ll try to clean it up a bit and post it here when I get a chance. I figure it will be easier to start a map while the codebase is 40k LOC and update it over time than waiting until the project becomes so big that it becomes a daunting task. As I’m going over the codebase I’m finding lots of little parts that would be good to tighten up, as well as areas that could be refactored into a more comprehensible arrangement (example 1: misc.lisp in the top-level).

Thought of a decent backronym for the BSD in NiceBSD - ‘Basic Software Distribution.’ I suppose ‘Nice Lisp Software Distribution’ might be more descriptive, but the acronym would make that a tougher sell in the business space ;-)

I’m hoping to get a more accurate assessment of current system LOC count soon. It’s hard when it’s a non-self bootstrapping system, because you wonder whether to include incidental software. Right now, the quicklisp codebase (not yet integrated into the source tree) runs ~82.2k LOC, and Mezzano ~44k LOC, so about 126k. The NiceBSD LOC cap is 1 million lines of code (excluding hardware drivers), so there’s plenty of room to grow there. Nevertheless, I’ll soon have a script to pull all this automatically, and we can watch the codebase grow over time.

I had lunch with Jonnay (of the Epic Ambient Battle), and started discussing how best to start with the first public releases of NiceBSD. I’m going to lay out an actual roadmap with milestones before I drop the first image, so it’ll be clear what’s missing, and when you can expect to see all the features you’re hoping for.

Updated the NiceBSD.org technical goals page. As a reward for such a productive day, decided to watch some puroresu - some good stuff below: