On Fri, 17 Dec 1999, Greg A. Woods wrote:

# From what I can see problems don't occur until you start compiling
# things again, and then only if you've got old third-party libraries
# mixed into the fray.

So we're supposed to, what, hold out for five or six more releases before
we decide to rebuild anything?  I somehow don't think this is going to sit
very well with most people (for example, I tend to rebuild fresh instances
of packages for the version of the OS that I'm running!).

By the way, regarding backwards combatability, how long are we going to
keep it?  There will be a point at which backward compatibilty with
every 1.x release is going to become horribly inefficient (how many system
calls are we going to keep around?).  I mean, don't get me wrong -- it's
nice to have 1.2 stuff run under 1.4.1, but I can't see much point in
hanging onto it _forever_.  That decision needs to be seriously considered
before we get too far afield.

[just 'cause I'm not a kernel wizard doesn't mean I completely blow
 smoke, either... :-)]

# Won't bumping library major numbers make it possible to clean up all
# this mess in one swoop?  How much extra work does this cleanup require?

I think that at this point if we upgrade the major version of the library,
we will be forcing the door shut on ANY backward compatibility.   We may
need to bite the bullet on that one, or we may need to find a way to
strictly isolate the older version in a way that older programs will
depend on it, and that newer programs cannot depend on it.

Sticky as hell, to be sure, and everything should be carefully considered,
but we're going to do something about this eventually -- I would think that
the more it is drawn out, the harder it's going to get.

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: You can't handle it.