On Sat, 12 Jan 2002, Allen Briggs wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 10:51:36AM -0600, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
>
> > Where do you get the latest Booter, anyway?
>
> You can currently pick it up from ftp.macbsd.com as well as from Nigel's
> site.  I need to update ftp.netbsd.org, too, I guess.  Nigel's waiting for
> us to do this before he announces it.  [nigel--sorry it's not been done
> yet]

Cool. I didn't find it yesterday, but I'll look again.

> > In fact, the consensus is not to offer binaries built against current at
> > all, not even on ports that aren't in the midst of a binary format switch.
>
> Didn't we used to do this, though?

Yes, at first. After a time, it was discovered that most of the
"lettered" package directories (1.4R, 1.3H and so on) had nothing but
one-offs, that didn't even have all the pre-requisites to install, and
weren't likely to work on any machine except the machine they were built
on. To use a numbered release package, you can install a compat*
package. However, no-one wants to create or maintain a compat package
containing every possible shared library that could have been built on
the development track, which is what you'd have to do to support the
lettered packages.

I seem to remember that the kicker was when "openssl" dropped rc5 and
idea just before netbsd-1-5 was cut, and we decided it was simply
undesirable to support binary packages built against 1.4Z? for all time.
Of course, we should support old binaries and old shared libraries in
the base system: no one suggested dropping all the COMPAT_* code from
libc and the kernel. Providing all those "interim" shared libraries,
such that any binary built on any development version would be portable
to all future systems, is another matter -- it's just not practical.

Frederick