About netKSB

This project was born as an idea for a final project to mark the end of my studies at the University of Uppsala. I thought it would be interesting and a good experience for me, and a chance to make a small contribution back to the community. When I started of with this project I had no experience designing applications larger than it could fit into a small set of files, on top of that I had never used curses. But despite these minor technicalities, I want to create a small and reliable tool.

Above is an abstract view of how the application is organized. The library layer contains functionality not involved in the actual presentation of information and is shared between the two different versions of presentation layers. The idea is to create two interfaces for the process of building NetBSD from source. The ability to save settings and configuration for a specific host would simplify successive builds of NetBSD.

The application will also be able to generate a stripped down kernel configuration by comparing a kernel device configuration output against a generic configuration by removing any unused drivers, much like adjustkernel.

Another part I want to create is the "online" help. Say for example that a user is editing a kernel configuration and wants information about the "ath"-driver. This information should just be a click away.

I do this for fun, and hopefully it will be somewhat useful to others as well. I know it's probably not the right tool for everyone, the target user is most likely not a seasoned UNIX-wizard (but who knows). I have a couple of ideas laying around that could become a part of this application, look at the roadmap for a more detailed description.