[ On Monday, May 3, 1999 at 15:19:24 (-0700), Jonathan Stone wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: CVSup collections for a NetBSD CVS tree 
>
> And *that* is going against the goals of the Project.
> 
> As far as I'm concerned Greg is more than welcome to set up an
> unofficial server. If it becomes `official' then we need a migration
> plan to get CVSup support for *all* ports.  And that should be
> responsibility of the people advocating CVSUp.

Absolutely not.  That's never been the way NetBSD works (except for a
very few exceptionally devoted and highly skilled developers).  The
people who want to use something on their platform do the work to make
it happen or else they do without it.  That goes double for anything
that's not 100% portable but is already in the pkgsrc tree.  Even within
the full system there are more than enough examples of significantly
different levels of support by NetBSD for various platforms.

I only know of one significant instance where a popular port did without
a certain feature (much to the detriment of all of NetBSD and only after
an enormous amount of often heated discussion) just because the
available solution wouldn't work on all platforms.  In that particular
case though it wasn't merely a matter of porting an appliction -- the
available solution was flawed by design, even to some extent on the
platform it would have helped most.  In the end a good design was
developed and implemented to solve the problem on all platforms, but it
was far too late to gain back the supporters and deveopers who left for
greener pastures.

> They want it, *they* do the donkeywork to port m3. Not me.

If *you* don't want to use CVSup then you don't have to do the porting,
but anyone who does want to use CVSup and who is using an unsupported
platform will either have to do it themselves or find someone who will
help them.

In addition there's nothing anywhere I can find in the published NetBSD
goals that says a tool has to be 100% ported before it can be used to
offer services under the netbsd.org name.  Although it's a bad example
for other reasons I'll note that GNATS isn't even in the package
collection, yet it's been used for the PR database for a long time now.
Yes, gnats is portable but that's irrelevant because it doesn't have to
be portable to be used by those who need to use it.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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