At 12:22 PM -0800 3/9/2001, Lee Reynolds wrote:
>I never said that the PC was the ONLY development
>platform used, only that it was the primary platform
>used.  If there are 34 developers and 15 to 20 of them
>are using PCs, then it would not be inaccurate to say
>that the PC was the primary platform used.  The
>numbers are hypothetical of course, but are based off
>a real and simple fact: PC's are far more common than
>all other platforms put together, and they offer the
>best performance for the dollar.

At equivalent clock speeds the Macs usually outperform 386's and 
Pentiums on quite a few benchmarks.  Even at slower clock speeds the 
Mac OS can outperform Windoze machines on many benchmarks.  Lots of 
examples out there in 'netland and published in various magazines. 
"Best performance per dollar" is a little tough to quantify given the 
wide range of prices for computers of identical specification.  Are 
we talking new or used?  Iin general  Mac OS is far more reliable 
than Windows- and IME NetBSD on a Mac blows both of them out of the 
water for reliability.  Isn't that a significant value-for-dollar 
performance issue?  IMO NetBSD is tough to beat!

>  Therefore it makes no difference whether the coder
>that added a particular feature to the kernel was
>using a PC or Sparcstation, and PCs are a lot more
>common than Sparcs.  I'd be willing to bet that many
>people are using PC's to do work on the ports to other
>platforms.  The availability of cross compilers and
>the massive speed difference between even a PII-233
>and a Quadra 800 or an Amiga 3000 provides good reason
>to do your coding and compiling on the PC and actual
>testing of that code on the Quadra or Amiga.

Isn't comparing a 68040 Mac (or any m68k-based computer) to a Pentium 
II/233 a grossly unfair comparison?  The Pentium is the PPC of the 
Wintel world.  Compare a Pentium to a G3 and the story changes quite 
a bit.

None of this is an answer to your original question, however- 
although it is beginning to sound less like a question and more like 
an editorial.  Look at it this way:  there are hundreds of thousands 
of Macs that are now essentially unused because Internet technology 
in particular has passed them by.  NetBSD (and others) is a new lease 
on life for them as useful, practical machines.  I certainly hope the 
port is maintained, because it lets me use a reliable and dirt cheap 
machine for a myriad of services that are poorly supported in Mac OS: 
IP/NAT, firewalls, apache... my server cost me under $100 for CPU, 
keyboard/mouse, monitor, AAUI -> 10BaseT adapter.  If I was to buy a 
purpose built Linux server I'd pay, what, 40 times as much?  NetBSD 
allows the re-use of a valuable resource:  dormant CPU cycles.