In some email I received from David Gilbert, sie wrote:
> 
> 	I think that a the NetBSD user is expected to be a little more
> savvy... that is a policy that will take us awhile to escape.  People
> don't choose NetBSD randomly... they generally choose it with an eye
> to a certain purpose.  Currently, I'm running Sun4, Sun3, Amiga and
> i386 NetBSD machines at home.  One OS over several available platforms
> reduces admin overhead --- and I planned it that way.

More savvy or more time to learn the pecularities of it ?  Time is a
precious commodity for some of us.

If we're advocating NetBSD towards the "more savvy", does that mean I
shouldn't be recommending it to people ?  What should I tell them to use
then; Linux (if they don't want to use SunOS/Solaris on their sparc) ?
What does that say of those we really want to use it ?

If you ask "what do you look in an OS for use in a research environ. ?",
(for computer science stuff), do we want issues such as the above to be
factors ?  Having installed Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD on a PC, to me NetBSD
seemed more of a "hacker's unix" than a "user's unix".

Looking at the differences in /etc/daily between NetBSD and FreeBSD is...
interesting.  Neither team has `totally' cleaned it up to be (perhaps)
what it should be, but with an intelligent merge...:)  This is one of the
comments in FreeBSD:

# This is not safe, you need to decide what is appropriate for your
# system. Leave a warning note for now.
echo "You did not enable the cleaning of / in /etc/daily!"
#
#find / ! -fstype local -a -prune -o \
#     \( -name '[#,]*' -o -name '.#*' -o -name a.out -o -name *.core \
#        -o -name '*.CKP' -o -name '.emacs_[0-9]*' \) \
#             -a -atime +3 -exec rm -f -- {} \;
#

- the find for /scratch is non-existant.

darren
p.s. My purpose was simple: to use NetBSD for porting software.
p.p.s I think the above find should look for '*emacs*' too >;-)