On Fri, 18 Aug 2000, Rakhesh Sasidharan wrote:

> Anyways, while we are on the topic, could somebody advise me the pros and
> cons on upgrading to 1.5 from 1.4.2.  More specifically, I am given to
> understand (please correct me if I am wrong) that 1.5 is still under
> development, and I wan't to know how OK it is run something like that.
> I'm just using it on my home PC -- nothing mission critical or anything.

1.5 is at alpha stage. (There is no NetBSD-1.5, only 1.5_ALPHA.) Since
you asked, you should upgrade only if 1) You intend to file (good,
detailed, lucent) bug-reports for problems encounterd with the
installation/upgrade process, and 2) You intend to upgrade to 1.5 when
it becomes available. So if you have to ask... you should at least
wait for the 1.5_BETA. :-)

1.5_ALPHA[12] is quite stable, but there are drawbacks to running
alpha code. There will be no binary packages for 1.5 until after 1.5
is released (of necessity). This could be especially bad on i386,
because 1.4.2 to 1.5 changes binary formats from a.out to ELF. It is
possible to run all your old a.out binaries under emulation, but the
procedure isn't well documented yet.