I'm the only user, so I can tolerate changes and occasional non-serious
   flakiness, but I have work to do and I need certain things to work.  I have to
   have SLIP or equivalent, I need XEmacs, and I have to be able to run these big
   Lisp applications that I use.  This is not, unfortunately, a spare machine
   that I can dedicate to NetBSD with no particular consequences... maybe if I
   had an old SS1 lying around I could do that.

SLIP works for heaps of people, so that isn't a problem.  i've heard
people mumble about xemacs on netbsd, so i assume it will work there
if you compile it native.  for the lisp, can you compile the lisp
as a native netbsd binary ?  that might help.
   
   I do have one specific motivation for using NetBSD, though, which is the SunOS
   file partition size limit of 2GB.  The kind of stuff I do chews up disk space
   in a hurry, and I would like to be able to have bigger partitions, now that
   disks are so much bigger.

gosh, and to think for me it's to actually enjoy computers for a
change... :-)

.mrg.