On Sat, Mar 10, 2001 at 04:34:35PM +0700, Robert Elz wrote:
> 
> Now you're quite welcome to keep running NetBSD 1.5 forever if you
> want to, and then none of the nasty changes will ever affect you again.
> You could even run 1.4, or 1.3, or something older.   You could even
> fork off DeadBSD from some point in the NetBSD tree where you think
> it was still pure enough to run.

This has been done -- see the extended flamage on the unix-preservation
lists over the "Quasijarus" project, which unsurprisingly has managed to
accomplish ~nothing, since its goals ultimately degenerate to "stay the
same forever".

That said, I think we realy *do* have an issue that we add too much
functionality without thinking about it hard enough, and that even when we
attempt to do so in a modular way, we can't help penalizing our historical
platforms for that modularity itself (calls through function pointers are
NOT free, just as one obvious example applying to the kernel).  There have
been effective strategies for dealing with this in the past, but sadly they
have never made it into mainstream kernels or even the toolchains that
support them, which is a shame; see Synthesis and its use of code overlay
and the superoptimizer, for example.