Re: Dead ports [Re: config(5) break down]

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>>> [...] sun2, pmax, algor, etc. [...]
>> Right, and these dead ports must be euthanized.
> For those single developers who still have such machines, as a
> "hardware replacement" and moral compensation, TNF could buy some new
> ARM or MIPS board for hacking.  Would be a win-win case, would not?

Wow.  Talk about missing the point.

I run NetBSD...well, I run it for multiple reasons.  But the one that's
relevant here is the hobbyist reason: to do something at least
nominally useful with that old hardware.  (Like most hobbies, this is
fundamentally emotionally motivated, so trying to understand it from a
purely rationalist standpoint is probably pointless.)  If NetBSD loses
interest in being that OS, it loses its value in this regard; providing
me with different hardware that NetBSD *does* make useful is a kind
thought, but utterly beside the point when it comes to support for the
old machines.

Given reason to think that $PORT does not actually have any users,
perhaps.  But, as various people have pointed out, lack of downloads of
binary builds is hardly evidence of that.  I've got pmax hardware that
I'd be using - under NetBSD - if I had the leisure to figure out what
was wrong and, probably, swap parts so as to make a working machine,
and I would not be doing any pmax binary downloads to do so.  I can't
tell for sure, but I quite probably have at least one or two of the
ports hiding in that "etc" as well - vax in particular; I still have a
MicroVAX-II, and if NetBSD desupports it, that will lose NetBSD a
<user,machine> pair, not convince me to switch to some "modern" machine
instead.  _You_ may think of computers as just abstract supplies of
computrons, but not everybody does.

...well, possibly if the "modern" machine plugged into the Qbus.  Give
me an ARM or MIPS board NetBSD runs on with a Q22 interface and I'll be
very interested indeed.

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