Re: Proposal: remove usr.bin/mkstr

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Sun, 10 Apr 2022 22:03:58 +0200
    From:        Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%bec.de@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <YlM4LkSzTduaneC1%bec.de@localhost>

  | Can you demonstrate that BSD 2 is cross-buildable from any recent NetBSD
  | release?

I haven't tried, but I have little doubt that it can be done.

  | It would strongly surprise me given that parts of K&R C are not
  | supported by the compilers in base and at least 64bit platforms are
  | going to violently object to a lot of other abuse in the code.

gcc2 and gcc3 are still in pkgsrc (I believe).   Those old releases
(I mean BSD 2, not old gcc) need a lot less as host tools to build than
we need today.   Someone who wanted to do that (or is already doing it
perhaps) would manage.

  | A lack of mkstr is the least of your problems.

Starting from nothing, probably.   But if someone has a working setup
already and mkstr suddenly vanishes?

Do you know there is none?   Not all NetBSD users read any of our mailing
lists, simply asked and getting no answers proves nothing.

  | It costs disk space and build time.

That's not worthy of comment.

  | for something without positive value,

That's just opinion.   That's my point.   We cannot know what doesn't
have value.  We know what we personally use, if we were to each treat
everything that we don't use, and cannot imagine wanting to use, as
being without positive value, and retired it, there'd soon be very
little left.

And:

  | If someone actually has a use case, it's not hard to
  | get a copy and package it independently. But that minority can pay the
  | price.

if that's your view, I will start on deleting all kinds of junk, that's
much more costly to build and retain than mkstr, and the minority that
want them can "pay the price".

Personally I don't think that's the direction we should be taking.   Unless
there's a real demonstrable cost to retaining something - which really means
human time consumed, nothing else costs enough to matter (I suppose there
might be a few truly huge things which almost no-one uses which we could
delete just to avoid the build time and space costs, but that would be rare).

And again, just this discussion is costing more in the value of
human time than (since it ended being developed anyway) mkstr has ever
consumed.    I bet that until this discussion started you didn't know
it was there?   I just did a ls or /usr/bin and I see lots of stuff that
I never even knew existed, never even seen a passing reference to many
of them, so clearly they're not very useful...   Really?

kre