On 2015-05-30 21:37, David Holland wrote:
On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 12:49:18PM +0200, Gert Doering wrote: > On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 10:22:35AM +0000, David Holland wrote: > > Because of these trends, I've been thinking for a while now that maybe > > it's getting to be time to fork. That would allow having one project > > that intends to stay current, with all the attendant requirements, > > which probably mostly doesn't make sense on vintage hardware; and > > another project that explicitly abandons most or all of that and > > instead concentrates on being the best possible traditional multiuser > > or workstation Unix, which does make sense on vintage hardware that > > was designed for (or could be adapted to) those roles, and which also > > makes sense on newer hardware to the extent it's consistent with the > > traditional role. > > I would argue that this has happened already - FreeBSD and NetBSD are > the results... at least from the outside, this is how it looks like, > with FreeBSD focusing on few platforms but modernizing itself quite > a bit (kernel preempting, zfs, ...) and NetBSD focusing on "it runs > everywhere". Yes, see, this is the problem. "It runs everywhere" now means "it is an OS for junkyard machines". That was never the intent when that was NetBSD's market positioning, 15+ years ago. Nor is it the reality now.
We have different views here. In my eyes, these "junkyard" machines have forced NetBSD to keep somewhat honest. The gradual dropping of "old" stuff means that in my eyes, things are going downhill towards more sloppy code and implementations, and more waste in general. So in my eyes, the "runs everywhere" is what have made NetBSD attractive at all, for all platforms, including modern ones.
If you drop that, then NetBSD really becomes just yet another Unix clone, for which there is no real reason for it to exist at all. There are plenty of other alternatives in that niche, that have a much larger following. NetBSD will totally fail if they decide that this is where it should be going.
> I'm not sure the BSD worlds needs yet another fork. No, it doesn't. On the other hand, running the same OS on 32-way x86_64 and Sparc IPC is increasingly not feasible or sensible.
I don't follow you here. So what are you saying. That people who want to run some more modern software on old hardware should just go away? Or just throw away the old hardware and get some x86_64, and still continue to run NetBSD?
What about people who actually enjoy running odd hardware? What are the options? From your arguing, I would say that the logical conclusion is that we *need* a fork, since you obviously are saying that supporting old hardware is not in the interest of NetBSD anymore.
Now, a fork for people having old hardware don't have to originate from NetBSD, or from NetBSD-current. But in some ways it probably makes most sense to start from some point in NetBSD.
> Now, speaking as application developer: I'd hate to see yet another BSD > fork that I have to test OpenVPN on regularily, to see whether "we" or > "they" broke something and system-specific parts need to be adjusted... > (right now, we build and test on FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, and > various versions of those - sufficiently subtly different that there > has to be system-specific code for ifconfig/route handling...) Dragonfly? What about all the OpenBSD offshoots?
Application developers of current software still have issues, and I guess the only solution is to actually start decreasing the number of supported OSes, and start with the ones that the fewest people use. I wish OSes could be more coherent in their APIs, and even have binary compatibility done better, but I guess I'm not going to solve that one.
And remember - these are just my personal reflections and opinions. I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me.
Johnny
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