Re: revivesa status 2008/07/09

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Mindaugas Rasiukevicius wrote:
> Bringing SA back invents more than 3000 lines of very complicated
> code. Why?
>
> - To support specific backwards compatibility which we never actually
>   supported (see what Andrew and Jason wrote).

What do you mean by "... which we never actually supported"?  In my
world, NetBSD has always attempted to support backward compatibility.
Bill is busy fixing what I suspect is the most serious lapse in backward
compatibility that we have ever had.

> But again, the main thing which makes me upset is adding thousands of
> lines to improve few percent of theoretical cases. This breaks one of
> the main software engineering principles. I thought it is not the way
> NetBSD goes...

This focus on performance is missing the point.  I don't care how slow
it is, as long as a kernel built with options COMPAT40 can actually run
threaded applications that were built for NetBSD-4.x.

--apb (Alan Barrett)