Date:        Tue, 17 Jun 2003 21:52:26 -0700 (PDT)
    From:        Greywolf <greywolf@starwolf.com>
    Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.4.53.0306172145420.2116@rivendell.starwolf.com>

  | Thus spake William Allen Simpson ("WAS> ") sometime Today...
  | 
  | WAS> No, the only thing I wanted to know was whether a new kernel would
  | WAS> affect the building of userland, and the answer appears to be "yes",
  | WAS> but only in a negative way (a tool no longer working).
  | 
  | That's strange, to say the least, seeing as kernels -- especially GENERIC
  | ones -- have all the BC options in them, and should be able to handle
  | the shift easily.

Actually, no, they don't.   See  PR kern/20585 (from more than 3 months
ago).   I believe that currently the vax port is the only one that gets
this correct, all the others are (or were in March, and I have not noticed
any commits to fix this) broken.

It is entirely possible at the minute for a new kernel to break old
programs - it shouldn't happen, and wouldn't if the portmasters would
fix their config files (at least GENERIC, I don't care about people's
vanity kernels) or if someone would fix all of them.

That is, in this case the bug is that the new kernel isn't fully
backwards compatible, and should be, not that the doc says that it
is OK to install it while running old binaries.

kre

ps: well done to the vax port maintainers.   Why is perhaps the least
used of the NetBSD ports the best managed one?