On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 03:00:07 +0100
Johnny Billquist <johnny.billquist@softjar.se> wrote:

> I remember when we didn't have a build.sh... :-)
From those days I remember situations where I got caught in chicken -
egg problems. E.g. the build needed a newer toolchain, the new toolchain
needed a newer libc and the new libc was only buildable with the new
toolchain... (At that thime I did almost all my NetBSD work on VAXen.)
The ability to do a "native cross compile" via build.sh improved this a
"litle bit".

> And building the whole 4.3BSD took about half a day. Have we really=20
> gotten that much improvements to motivate a build time increasing from
> 12 hours to 7 days?
Well. 4.3BSD had pcc, not gcc. IIRC it took only a hour to bild a
4.3BSD-Tahoe kernel on a MV II. But back then the kernel was only 7 MB
of source, already containing two or three architectures.

Lets face it. We live in the year of 2005 and not 1985 when 4.2 / 4.3
BSD where hot. The world has changed in the past 20 years. Today I want,
I _need_, a system with features like crypto stuff (SSL, ssh, IPsec,
...), ANSI C and C++ compiler, NFS, SMP, mmap(2), audio(4), X11, ...

We have to find a way between retarded minimalism and bloat. For me
NetBSD was allways the system that got the right balance of new
functionality and featuritis. Of course we have to pay a price for this
new functionality. Sorry for this hard words: If you don't wane pay this
price you have to stick with software from the days "when everything was
better".=20

I still find it astonishing how good NetBSD runs on old hardware. I use
a SPARCstation 1 running 3.0_BETA as a primary DNS server and it does
this job verry well.

On the other side: Yes, the VAX port is a bit lingering. There are
anoying bugs. (Was that partition > 4 GB FFS corruption bug ever found /
fixed?) But the VAX port is still better supported then other ports. I
think there are still more VAXen running NetBSD out there then - say -
HP300 machines. At least the port-hp300 mailing list is verry silent.

Not to mention new developements like Blazs wscons support for VAXen.
--=20


tsch=FC=DF,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/