[ On Sunday, October 28, 2001 at 00:09:31 (-0700), Bill Studenmund wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Embedded NetBSD?
>
> You are missing the case of folks who are *administratively* not permitted
> to use NetBSD. It's not that they have hardware we don't support, it's
> that they are in a place whose policy doesn't support NetBSD.

No, I'm not missing that case -- I understand it perfectly and have
already addressed it and and given what I feel to be the appropriate
approach to such a situation.

> I thankfully haven't worked in such a place, but they do exist. And I
> agree with you that it would probably be much saner for them to use
> NetBSD. But that doesn't change the fact that they exist.
> 
> So what do we do? Say we don't care about them?

Well, if you cater to them you do nothing to discourage them.  We don't
have to go out of our way to discourage them either, of course, which is
why I don't have any argument against what's been done to date.

Wouldn't it make more sense though to encourage use of NetBSD as a host
development platform (even where NetBSD isn't also the target platform)?
Certainly the work Todd et al have put into the cross-build support
encourages the use of NetBSD as a host for NetBSD embedded systems.
However there are many other things that could be offered to make NetBSD
a more pleasing host development environment for embedded systems.

> Why?

Because otherwise where does it end?  :-)

It's interesting to see that environments such as Cygwin and U/Win have
come full circle so to speak and are now successful enough that
developers refuse to (or at least refuse to object to using) use the
systems on which they are modeled even when the target platforms they
build will run some variant of those same very systems.

Why not instead port the embedded systems development tools (including
eCos development hosting) from Cygwin (and/or Linux) back to NetBSD?  :-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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