On 18-Jul-2001 Greg Lehey wrote: | | Well, interestingly enough, Luke and I were talking about cooperation | between the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects just over last weekend, and | one of the things that we decided was that it would be desirable to | add a new category of software to our source trees, software that is | used by all BSDs (well, within our terms of reference, NetBSD and | FreeBSD anyway). We didn't specifically mention his ftpd: we were | thinking more of things like USB support. The idea would be that we | might have a separate part of the source tree, like /usr/src//contrib, | which is maintained either by a group of people, or (preferably) one | person who ensures that it runs on all BSD platforms. The latter | might be difficult to implement, especially for kernel code, and even | for userland code there would be challenges. I've got a whole lot | more to say on the matter, but I'm sure that people will find a number | of weaknesses in my suggestions. Feel free to pick holes in the idea.

Yes, I think this would be a great idea, specifically for new code. However, I have doubts on how succesfull successfulit would be for current code, especially that which has diverged significantly between the branches.