Let me preface this by saying that I know that -current is always under
development; that it's not expected to work on a daily basis or work reliably
at all, and so forth.  Also, I did read the statement that another binary
snapshot probably wasn't going to happen until just before the next official
release.

Which is all perfectly reasonable and sensible, and I have no problem with any
of it, nor do I think it's my place to have a problem with it anyway.

However, I've got a major project I'm trying to implement using a number of
machines running NetBSD-i386, and 0.9 just won't work, for a number of
reasons, including the reason that I need immutable files, and also that 0.9's
wd driver is just too flaky for continuous use on a machine with only wd
disks.

I (after blowing things several times trying to upgrade to the latest current,
through various foolish actions of my own) had one prototype machine up and
running quite nicely; condensing several steps here, I'd upgraded from 0.9 to
the latest binary snapshot I had available, used that snapshot to build the
current -current, and everything worked.  Then, of course, that machine's disk
failed.  Now, since bootstrapping -current on 0.9 is substantially nontrivial,
I don't have any path back to where I was.

This is only because ftp.iastate.edu gets the 'arch' distribution by sup from
sun-lamp with the -d flag enabled, and because sun-lamp never seems to have
'arch' mounted anymore.  If for some reason 'arch' can't stay mounted on
sun-lamp, could it be mounted for some stretch of time such that ftp.iastate
could sup it, and the iastae stop deleting the files there?

This would give an easy upgrade path from 0.9 to current again, instead of a
very difficult one.  

It would also let those of us who don't already have the binary distributions
play with the sparc, sun3, and pmax ports.  Having recently glommed onto one
of each (I don't know whether to _celebrate_ that I have a pmax again or _cry_
:-) I'd like to give things a go, but since I have nowhere to get the binaries
from, it's much harder than I'd expect.

I don't mean to complain.  I don't mean to whine.  I hope I'm not doing
either.  I just think it would be a lot better for everyone involved if at
least the May 2 i386 snapshot could be permanently made available somewhere,
and not vanish into the void when its filesystem isn't mounted on sun-lamp,
which it never seems to be, anymore.

Thanks!

Thor

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