Re: Removing ARCNET stuffs

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 12:49:18PM +0200, Gert Doering wrote:
 > On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 10:22:35AM +0000, David Holland wrote:
 > > Because of these trends, I've been thinking for a while now that maybe
 > > it's getting to be time to fork. That would allow having one project
 > > that intends to stay current, with all the attendant requirements,
 > > which probably mostly doesn't make sense on vintage hardware; and
 > > another project that explicitly abandons most or all of that and
 > > instead concentrates on being the best possible traditional multiuser
 > > or workstation Unix, which does make sense on vintage hardware that
 > > was designed for (or could be adapted to) those roles, and which also
 > > makes sense on newer hardware to the extent it's consistent with the
 > > traditional role.
 > 
 > I would argue that this has happened already - FreeBSD and NetBSD are
 > the results...  at least from the outside, this is how it looks like,
 > with FreeBSD focusing on few platforms but modernizing itself quite
 > a bit (kernel preempting, zfs, ...) and NetBSD focusing on "it runs
 > everywhere".

Yes, see, this is the problem. "It runs everywhere" now means "it is
an OS for junkyard machines". That was never the intent when that was
NetBSD's market positioning, 15+ years ago. Nor is it the reality now.

 > I'm not sure the BSD worlds needs yet another fork.

No, it doesn't. On the other hand, running the same OS on 32-way
x86_64 and Sparc IPC is increasingly not feasible or sensible.

 > Now, speaking as application developer: I'd hate to see yet another BSD
 > fork that I have to test OpenVPN on regularily, to see whether "we" or 
 > "they" broke something and system-specific parts need to be adjusted...
 > (right now, we build and test on FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, and 
 > various versions of those - sufficiently subtly different that there
 > has to be system-specific code for ifconfig/route handling...)

Dragonfly? What about all the OpenBSD offshoots?

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost