On Mar 20,  2:08pm, Rick Kelly wrote:
> Subject: Re: DEC uses NetBSD
> der Mouse said:
>
> >Here we see one of the problems with jumbo-packs.  Only two of the five
> >"essentials" you list are things I'd even wast^H^H^H^Hdevote any disk
> >space to, never mind consider "essential".
>
> I agree.
>
> And one interesting exercise is to take a look at at the FreeBSD
> packages section of the BSDisc CDROM.  I bought it as it also comes
> with NetBSD 1.2, and I made a decision to support the ability to buy
> NetBSD over the counter.  However, although there are a large amount
> of binary packages for FreeBSD, a lot of them are old and out of
> date. This is packages-2.1.5.  On ftp.FreeBSD.ORG the packages collection
> is now packages-2.2, with some updated versions of binaries, and lots
> of the same old stuff.
>
> Someone has to maintain this stuff, as well as updating the makefiles in
> the ports collections.  How many of the ports would fail to make because
> an ftp site had moved recently?
>
> Binaries for non-UNIX gurus are probably a good thing, but keep the binary
> packages far away from the NetBSD source and binary distributions.  For
> the few things that I ftp in, I would just as soon build them myself,
> and configure them myself.

Currently there is at least one port which does a binary distribution (arm32).
It is maintained separately from the main source tree and I haven't noticed
anyone getting too upset about its existence. Some people who started off using
it are now using the source now they're familar with NetBSD - it gives them the
choice.

Cheers

Rob Black