Subject: Re: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly
To: None <mrg@eterna.COM.AU>
From: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>
List: current-users
Date: 05/26/1997 18:31:01
[I'm the author of the Web page in question]

I try to do a fair comparision between NetBSD and FreeBSD and I
welcome feedback on it.

I rejected change requests in the past, but only after discussion with
relevent parties and with basic agreement from the submitter's side
and those discussions has been very useful for all.

Let me comment on some of your points:

mrg@eterna.COM.AU (matthew green)

> [quoting another poster]

>   I don't see what's so bad about it.  Martin's pretty truthful here.

>has it been updated?  that document was written some time ago.

I had feedback on some issues and changed them a few hours
ago. Nothing really basic.

>   Our VM system DOES suck, and there's a PR on file whose last word is
>   "rewrite VM system".  Obviously not something you can do in a weekend.  OTOH,
>   bug fixes for the worst 1.2 VM problems were committed, so this isn't so
>   much of a problem.

>hopefully, many more changes are in store here ....
>   
>   As for using vi over NFS, I've done that and haven't lost.
> 
>our vi has mmap() turned off.

As of NetBSD-1.2, if I'm not mistaken.

I removed that comment from my document.

>   A lot of the source changes are cosmetic, and don't add functionality.

>i'm not trying to start a flame war with any freebsd people here but
>from what i've seen, freebsd have been -at least- as ``bad'' as netbsd
>in this...  either way, i think it's fairly insignificant.

I only claimed that *kernel* data structures change more often in
NetBSD than in FreeBSD and that people had a harder time keeping
drivers updated for NetBSD than for FreeBSD. NetBSD does this for a
number of good reasons and FreeBSD recently did so, too.

I don't consider this to be a real usage factor and I think my
comparision made that clear.

As I said, let me know if you have suggestions. 

Martin
-- 
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Martin_Cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de http://cracauer.cons.org  Fax.: +4940 5228536
"As far as I'm concerned,  if something is so complicated that you can't ex-
 plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin