[ On Friday, December 5, 2003 at 12:55:05 (-0800), Jason Thorpe wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: NetBSD 2.0 release date
>
> In any case, bumping the major version of a library like libc is 100% 
> guaranteed to cause great great great pain

What kind of pain are you talking about, and what causes it, exactly?

What breaks, _exactly_, if the old library binaries are left in place?
Are you really that worried that third party library vendors (if there
really are any) won't know how to also bump their library versions?

How many NetBSD users do you expect would actually feel any of this pain
given that a vast majority seem to sanely recompile everything in site
quite regularly anyway?  People only seem to complain about having to
recompile all their add-on software when it's forced upon them at times
they're not expecting it, and they will expect it and be prepared for it
when they do a major release upgrade, especially if they're told
up-front that it's necessary, and why it's necessary.

How many third party vendors actually supply shared libraries in
binary-only format specifically for NetBSD?  How many NetBSD users do
you think actually make use of these binary-only shared libraries?  How
many of these vendors have actually said that they would find it
difficult to also support generating new versions of their binary
libraries on a "legacy" system for the duration of time that it takes
the majority of their users to all upgrade past the libc bump?

I.e. are we talking about theory here, or practice, and if it's the
latter then how many real people do you think would be affected?

If nobody can answer any these questions with anything approaching valid
numbers then this "great great pain" is just a boogey-man in the closet.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
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