On Fri, 21 Sep 2001, Greg A. Woods wrote:

: > > I'm not so sure the Solaris solution is anywhere near ideal.  It has
: > > numerous twisted bass-ackwards quirks due to their insane desire to give
: > > 100% backward binary run-time compatabilty of the on-disk data.
: >
: > This is a goal for NetBSD too.
:
: I really truly sincerely hope it is not.  (note I said run-time compat)

It damn well is.  Because all BSD-utmp/wtmp based code doesn't have a libc
abstraction, it is a *must* for us to have backwards compatibility.

Note that this need not necessarily be based on some `background daemon'.  A
special device node with in-kernel emulation would also work; such a device
would be relatively simple to implement.  It need only emulate read/write
(struct translation) and seek (fixing offsets to their proper locations).

And, such a compatibility interface can be compiled out of the kernel
easily....

: Binary compatability, especially on this scope, is only for proprietary
: vendors and has no place as a goal with a freeware system that offers
: open source code as a primary goal.

Not everyone can afford the overhead of "recompile everything" with a major
release update.  And yes, backwards binary compatibility is one of TNP/TNF's
primary stated goals.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.
-- NetBSD 1.5.2 available on CD-ROM soon!  --  http://www.wasabisystems.com/