[ On Wed, March 27, 1996 at 01:45:17 (-0800), Michael L. VanLoon wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: another 1.1 to 1.1B (i386) upgrade report... 
>
> I think his point was that it shouldn't be included as a standard part
> of the OS.  Not to mention that even a dependency maintenance tool is
> insufficient when the dependencies cannot be resolved -- the point
> where you simply need to start with a binary snapshot upgrade and
> current sources, then no radical make system is necessary.  I have to
> throw my vote in with Chris on this one.

Then what the heck is a source distribution good for if you can't do
source-only upgrades with it????

I can see my way to automating source upgrades from vendor platforms to
NetBSD with source only in given circumstances.  Doing the same from a
previous release should be trivial.

Most everyone I know in this community either rides the edge of -current
just because it's fun and they can, or they stick to binary-only
releases and are often stuck in the dust when it comes to upgrades as
they feel it's too difficult to bother with building from sources,
esp. when they have to figure out some safe way to manage their own
fixes and features.

I myself wonder why I would ever any given system that's in good working
order, if it were built from sources in the first place.  I might
someday do a binary upgrade on such isolated systems, but if there have
been any necessary changes made to their specific source trees, I'm
likely to just include patches and hacks and leave them where they are.

This is about making it easy for folks to deal with *source* releases.

As a side-effect I believe it will also ease the task of upgrading to
periodic snapshots of the -current source tree.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734			VE3TCP			robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>