The change of userland to NetBSD came just before I got involved as a contributor, but to characterize it as making a mess of things isn't very fair.
The reason why it was done is because the MINIX3 project felt that they didn't have the manpower to maintain a compiler toolchain, base userland and packages on top of the actual operating system. Which, in retrospect, was spot on. Having a modern toolchain also enabled work such as live updates of almost every driver and service without interruption of services, by instrumenting LLVM to generate all required information, as well as the ARM port.
This also brought vastly increased compatibility when compared to other Unix-likes, enabling a fair amount of pkgsrc packages to build and run without patches. Reinventing the wheel from scratch as with SerenityOS is fun, but not very helpful if you want to run other people's software, especially if all you have is a C89 compiler (ACK).
There is a bug tracker in the form of GitHub issues that came as part of the migration to GitHub and a Gerrit server, which also happened before I got involved.
Now, I'm not Andy Tanenbaum nor one of the MINIX3 gurus and I certainly don't have the full picture myself, but merely saying the project slumbered because of poor ownership isn't actually helpful to learn lessons from it. Software project management is anything but easy, especially if you lack paid contributors.
The reason why it was done is because the MINIX3 project felt that they didn't have the manpower to maintain a compiler toolchain, base userland and packages on top of the actual operating system. Which, in retrospect, was spot on. Having a modern toolchain also enabled work such as live updates of almost every driver and service without interruption of services, by instrumenting LLVM to generate all required information, as well as the ARM port.
This also brought vastly increased compatibility when compared to other Unix-likes, enabling a fair amount of pkgsrc packages to build and run without patches. Reinventing the wheel from scratch as with SerenityOS is fun, but not very helpful if you want to run other people's software, especially if all you have is a C89 compiler (ACK).
There is a bug tracker in the form of GitHub issues that came as part of the migration to GitHub and a Gerrit server, which also happened before I got involved.
Now, I'm not Andy Tanenbaum nor one of the MINIX3 gurus and I certainly don't have the full picture myself, but merely saying the project slumbered because of poor ownership isn't actually helpful to learn lessons from it. Software project management is anything but easy, especially if you lack paid contributors.