On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 02:42:03PM -0400, Sean Davis wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 01:02:17PM -0500, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> > On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Christian Limpach wrote:
> > 
> > > > What if TNF makes a CD of binary packages, and sells it? Under 3a, all
> > > > such CD's would have to include complete source, but under 3b, you can
> > > > just say, "Go download it" (in writing). I suppose we could make it a
> > > > point not to sell CD's with packages that are over three years old.
> > >
> > > Actually "Go download it" is not enough.  See:
> > > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCDistributeWithSourceOnInternet
> > 
> > I see. So we absolutely can't distribute CD's without accompanying
> > distfiles plus pkgsrc. This has an interesting implication, that the
> > unified 1.6* directory can't be used to make a CD, unless we
> > distribute the entire pkgsrc repository with it (not just a checkout).
> > This speak strongly in favor of the school of thought that advocates
> > "no binary packages between releases".
> 
> If we go there, we will forever be behind Linux, in both appeal to end-users
> and ease of package updating. For me, on my NetBSD machines, to update
> packages I have to rebuild them because there are never any up to date
> binary packages. I was at a friends house recently, who runs Debian, and to
> update all his packages he typed one command, it updated about 30 packages
> from binaries (he is using debian-unstable) and it took about fifteen
> seconds. This is something that has concerned me for some time. Almost all
> of the linux flavors have binary packages available all the time, almost
> always up to date. We don't.
> 
> Another issue, one which would be more properly addressed on tech-security,
> is that whenever a new security problem affects NetBSD, there is almost
> always a two or three delay in releasing a security advisory, when almost

                       ^ insert "day" there

> every Linux and *every* other BSD has an advisory out the same day as the
> bug. This makes us look even worse.
> 
> I am not a Linux advocate. I am a NetBSD fan 100%. But we're going to lose
> users, not gain them, if these problems are not addressed, I think.

-Sean

--
/~\ The ASCII
\ / Ribbon Campaign                   Sean Davis
 X  Against HTML                       aka dive
/ \ Email!