Subject: Re: NetBSD 2.0 release date
To: Greywolf <greywolf@starwolf.com>
From: Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>
List: tech-kern
Date: 12/05/2003 23:20:08
Greywolf wrote:
> Not to be offensive, here, but considering all the changes which have
> happened since 1.4 up to now, that's kind of slowly happening anyway.  The
> COMPAT_1* options seem pretty gratuitous, honestly, and maintaining
> complete compatibility going backwards, well, how long will it be before
> it is deemed to be too much of a stretch to maintain?

We do try to keep backward compat. In some regards the older releases
are desupported - e.g. pkgsrc doesn't support them, kernel growellers
are explicitly not supported, new PRs for older releases are no
longer accepted. But your old binaries should still continue running,
if you have kernel compiled with appropriate COMPAT_* options. And
we generally want to fix any occurence of breaking backwards compat.

Keeping backcompat is not really as painful as some people colour
it, it just needs a bit of care and thought.

Jaromir
-- 
Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>            http://www.NetBSD.cz/
-=- We should be mindful of the potential goal, but as the Buddhist -=-
-=- masters say, ``You may notice during meditation that you        -=-
-=- sometimes levitate or glow.   Do not let this distract you.''   -=-