I'm writing to say thanks for an incredible operating system.

No, that's not enough.

I've been running port-i386 for a while now, and every time I cd into
the pkgsrc tree and type make, and then watch it grab two or three
obscure little libraries, build them automatically, and return to
building the one I asked it for, I grin and shake my head, "Thank
God!"

The worst experience I compare it with is building the Gnome tree..
by hand..  from the tarball source.

So I was fighting with the source for about five hours, and fifteen
levels of dependency recursion later I was finally able to build the
gnome-core libraries! Success, right?! Not a chance. "You need
blah-library >= version 1.2.9." Thanks for telling me where it is,
stupid tarball!

So the fact that we're able to store the hard work that someone else
went through, let it save everyone else the trouble..  well it just
makes me sigh with relief and thank god I came back to the NetBSD
fold.

I've been around other OSes for the past two years--Linux (RedHat
mostly), BSDI (what a hellish experience that was--even building
autoconf was a pain), IRIX (nice if you can figure out what's going
on)..

I must say that after all the crap I went through, it's nice coming
back to a platform where the configuration files don't depend on a
parental hierarchy ten levels high, where the most popular packages
have already been worked into the pkgsrc tree by a thoughtful someone,
where WindowMaker runs like it's supposed to, where UVM doesn't chunk
out at its limits and kill the entire system, where my ethernet device
name gives me an idea what device I'm dealing with, where rebuilding
the kernel *IS* as simple as "make depend; make; cp ./netbsd /;
reboot", where The Right Way is constantly argued about on tech-kern,
and where I *don't* have to worry about the latest instability in a
kernel so mucked up with functionality they can't keep up with
themselves!

*pant pant pant*

Okay I'm better.

On behalf of all the users who appreciate your hard work but never
voice their opinion, I'd like to say Thanks!

From a (hopefully) obviously appreciative, hardworking soul who is
happy with his firewalls and file servers.

Marc Tooley
marc@sudog.com