I have taken the liberty of adding NetBSD's current-users mailing list 
as a receiver to this message, as I see itojuns question relevant for
the NetBSD world as well as the KAME world...

On Sat, Dec 05, 1998 at 02:19:08AM +0900, Jun-ichiro itojun Itoh wrote:
> 	KAME team is using NetBSD 1.3.2 as base version for KAME/NetBSD right
> 	now.  However, most of NetBSD people (especially those who do kernel
> 	hack every day) seem to use NetBSD "current".  Between NetBSD-1.3.2
> 	and NetBSD-current there are many important changes.  However,
> 	"current" is a moving target.

Yes, until NetBSD 1.4 is released, hopefully not too late in 1999, the "distance"
between the released version (currently 1.3.2, planned: 1.3.3 just before
Christmas) and "current" is quite big. After the 1.2 and 1.3 released, I
was surprised how quickly -current diverged significantly from the previous
release.

 
> 	The question is: how KAME team can sync with more recent NetBSD,
> 	without heavy labor of merging?
> 
> 	If there's something like "NetBSD monthly snapshot, dated December 1"
> 	it would be much easier for us to sync KAME with more recent NetBSD.
> 	We need some base version to start with.

You can find source snapshots at ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/
tar_files/src regularly. I don't recall the exact update frequence, possibly
once per week.

> 
> 	We can't merge NetBSD changes into KAME repository every day,
> 	it is too much task for us.  It is also too hard to require all
> 	KAME/NetBSD users to checkout NetBSD repository on some specific date,
> 	make World, then install KAME.  We really need NetBSD monthly
> 	snapshot, with binary provided from some ftp server for normal users.

Monthly source snapshots are easy to make: just make a copy of the above
mentioned snapshots once per month, but providing binaries based on the same
sources is unrealistic. The blessing (and sometimes the curse) of NetBSD is
that it supports more than a dozen hardware platforms, and several of these
have been used with KAME, e.g. i386, sparc and pmax.

Binary NetBSD snapshots appear irregularly and independently for each hardware
platform. On some machines, it may take literally several days to build a
snapshot. This is a tough requirement.

However, I don't think that it is an unreasonable requirement to expect people
wanting to run NetBSD/Current with IPv6 software (of any kind) to be able
to maintain their system by compiling it from source on site. Actually this
is really necessary anyway with todays KAME software using NetBSD 1.3.2.

> 
> 	Putting KAME into NetBSD repository will solve the problem (of course)
> 	but there are many issues for that:
> 	- we have to make KAME -Werror clean :-)
> 	- we need to think again about type of protosw[] and chained header
> 	  processing, so that KAME can be more compatible with traditional
> 	  4.4BSD network stack.
> 	- it needs NetBSD core team's agreement, of course.  I heard last
> 	  spring that NetBSD is planning to go with INRIA IPv6 distribution.
> 	  I see no move so far since then...

Neither have I -- We have machines running with NetBSD and both the KAME
and INRIA IPv6 software, and we just slowly learning both to know, but cannot
give any well-founded reason to prefer one or the other for integration with
NetBSD. I do, however, strongly support that NetBSD makes the decision for
integrating some IPv6 into the base release -- of course this needs to be
coordinated with the providers of the IPv6 software with respect to the
rights to the software and to the division of labour and responsibility.

To avoid delaying NetBSD 1.4 further, I suspect that it is not realistic 
to do this before 1.4 has been released.

> 
> 	Any thoughts/comments/tips would be helpful.  Thanks.
> 
> itojun

Erik Bertelsen, UNI-C.