On 2/21/07, Greg A. Woods <woods@planix.com> wrote:
> At Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:32:17 -0800,
> Bucky Katz wrote:
> >
> > But I "or someone else" did not remove functionality that the NetBSD
> > user community was relying on without even asking if they were.
> >
> > This is the crux of this whole discussion.
>
> But that just shows that you really do not yet "get it" with respect to
> the use of -current by a third party developer such as yourself.
>
> You should not have been relying on -current in the first place, thus in
> reality nobody has so far removed anything you should be depending on.
>
> If your argument were originally stated as something like this:
>
>         "Can someone please make sure that SA will work with newlock2 so
>         as to provide efficient M:N threading via libpthread on
>         uniprocessor systems before the newlock2 code reaches a release
>         branch?"
>
> then you you would have been on the right track and that would really
> have been all you needed to say for the time being (except perhaps to
> also offer your help in achieving that goal).
>


Agreed!  -current is for forward-moving OS development.  Branches are
for production use.

The -real- mistake here was a company following the advice of someone
to base a product on a target that moves daily.  Do you
re-branch/re-merge your internal work after your nightly cvs update?
(I think in this case it was weekly?  I don't recall exactly)  How
would you ever complete your work?  Without the stable branch, when
can you say "current is good enough right now."?  -current never
stops!

This whole thread feels like someone trying to pass the blame for a
misguided technical decision.

Can you imagine trying to use linux 2.6.yesterday to base your
production embedded app on and then complain when netfilter gets
replaced by some other project?  You'd be laughed out of usenet. ;)