On 10/28/07, Christian Baer <christian.baer@uni-dortmund.de> wrote:
> Es there something like mergemaster on NetBSD?

Not exactly, but there is postinstall which does the post upgrade
cleanup. But the install kernel handles this for you.

> May I ask what exactly this was? I'm just trying to estimate the magnitude
> of the bug you are talking about.

http://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=37219

I found a simple, cheap "NAS" enclosure that spins down the disk and
uses almost zero power for the most part. Well, while the disk isn't
spinning. I've found that these simple "NAS" devices do their shares
similar to how win95 did it, no username, just a password. I'm not up
to speed on what this is called in Windows speak. But this
functionality doesn't work with the mount_smbfs in NetBSD.

I'm on a bit of a quest to reduce my computer power consumption. My
Cobalt Qube2 goes a long way towards this. If it performed better I
would be using it as my #1 server (there is a NetBSD bug in the PCI
implementation so it doesn't perform as well as Linux unfortunately).

But if I can integrate these NAS machines, that would also go a long
way toward reducing power consumption.

> I can live with the occasional bug or an error in the source tree that
> causes a build to break. I just get annoyed if this kind of thing stays
> for weeks on end and I need the update to fix a critical bug or security
> hole. But I can't really imagine that happening.

It really doesn't happen as far as I can tell. There are occasional
bugs and holes, but if they are serious and/or highly pervasive, they
tend to get fixed pretty quick. The downside is, if you use obscure
hardware sometimes bugs stay open a while.

Andy