> rumours (directly from someone who visited and saw it for real) that
> even Microsoft developed DOS, early versions of Windows and some
> applications on Xenix systems for quite a long time (at least up to 1986

As a MicroSerf Intern in 1991, I can testify that we used _OS/2_ to develop
code which would eventually run on Windows; in fact everyone in my group
avoided Windows like the plague, except for final testing. All unit testing
was done on OS/2 where you could get nice clean SEGV's.

> cross-compilation tools for embedded systems (primarily for the AT&T
> DMD-5620 terminal, and I'll note that an older incarnation of the AT&T C

Hey, we had two of those in my dorm at school... Those suckers were tough;
even from the 5-story Aero building, we had to drop them 3 times before the
CRTs would implode.

> But....  I'm not so interested in these "snapshot" things though.  I
> personally think they're a distraction from the real job of producing
> the products that go into a real release.  They might be "easier" to
> build automatically, but if you spend all your time making their builds
> work perfectly then who's going to work on making the release builds
> work perfectly and automatically and who's going to use which format on
> a regular basis?

I think you may not realize how far ``make snapshot'' has come in the last
year. It is not far off from being usable for both snapshots and releases.
If I spend all my time making these builds work perfectly, then it lets
everyone else get on with the job of producing products. Not a bad deal...

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/arch/{alpha,arm32,i386,mac68k,sparc,sun3}/snapshot/19991223

Most of those are available already; mac68k+sun3 are on the way up.

I haven't figured out how to build X or crypto yet, but I'm working on it.

> As you say yourself, on of the major advantages of the FreeBSD scheme is
> that it's in the tree and lots of people beat on it every day.

And so it is with ``make snapshot''. It is in the tree, therefore it stands
a remote chance of being beat upon by lots of people every day. If nobody
works on ``make snapshot'' or puts their changes into the tree, then it has
no hope of being beat upon, ever.

After uploading mac68k+sun3, I cleaned up my patch files and sent them to
a committer who offered to evaluate them for me. Life goes on.

http://www.toddpw.org/arch-farm.html

The goal is regular snapshots, of the same sources, for as many ports,
and of as much of the system as practical.

It irks me whenever I see us make announcements like "CardBus in -current"
and I know that nobody will be able to download a snapshot with that code
in it for weeks or perhaps even months. We need the equivalent of
FreeBSD-stable, and frequent synchronized snapshots are essentially the
same thing, just on oodles more architectures.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com