I noticed that we have just passed 4 years since the release of NetBSD
8.0, on July 17, 2018:
https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-8/NetBSD-8.0.html
pkgsrc announcements have cautioned that desktop-type programs are
increasingly troubled on NetBSD 8 for a long time. Soon(tm), for some
value of soon, the releaes of NetBSD 10 will cause NetBSD 8 to be
formally de-supported.
I therefore wonder about usage of NetBSD 8 with up-to-date pkgsrc, and
would like to hear about:
1) Is anyone using NetBSD 8 as a desktop, running X11 and things like
firefox, thunderbird, kde/gnome/lxqt/fce4/etc., gimp, qgis and other
large things? If you are, I would like to hear
a) Why haven't you updated to NetBSD 9?
b) What branch of pkgsrc do you choose to run, and why? What is
your experience?
c) Do you care what the "8.0" symlink points to, or do you use some
value like 8.0_2021Q1 in pkgin? Or do you not use TNF-provided
binary packages? (Note that policy says the symlink will be
moved forward even if upstream changes cause packages to not
build. See https://www.pkgsrc.org/quarterly/.)
1A) Similar, but without things like firefox. I mean more like
old-school X11, a few widgets, GTK emacs.
2) Are people using NetBSD 8 in a server environment (no X11, things like
apache/nginx, pgsql/mysql, postfix/dovecot, spamassassin, etc.)?
a) Are you able to just use the most recent pkgsrc branch without
difficulty, or are there missing packages that used to build?
In part, my question is "Is any effort warranted to keep
big-desktop-type things working on NetBSD 8?" (That is not to suggest
that anyone is willing to expend the effort!)
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