>But that's just me.  ACtually, no, from the discussion I've seen, it
>isn't just me.
>

You're right...It's you and Greg. It's real easy to write off a hard problem
if it doesn't affect you or you chose not to let it affect you. 

Fine, you're willing to recompile everything for an upgrade...Most people
that I've introduced NetBSD to have no intrest in learning the mechanics
of the large scale make build process. They love things like pkgsrc and 
telling them:

"to go from 1.5 -> 1.6 requires you to recompile everything in pkgsrc and
you either have to learn the build system so you can prebuild before
converting or lose all of /usr/pkg after upgrading before you rebuild..."

just does them a disservice.

The point of good system releases should be both new features and 
backwards compatibility. Not backwards compatibility necessarily to the Nth
degree but needlessly breaking old binaries when there are other solutions
(via symbol renaming, etc) that work in it's place IMO aren't worth the bad
press/confusion that results from people who have gotten accustomed to old
binaries "just working" on new system builds.

James