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On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 02:26:59PM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Is the head of NetBSD cvs currently stable/reasonable?=20

Seems to be to me, and there are many useful fixes. Certainly, no
worse than -current ever is, and a lot better than it sometimes
(rarely) can be.

> I've been
> hesitant to upgrade due to the hearing about the switch to gcc4.

This begs two questions:

 - upgrade from what as a starting point?  an earlier current from
   (say) a few months ago, or from a 3.0-something?  if the former,
   i'd say go ahead and swap a whole bunch of known fixed issues in
   the past few months for the risk of new ones that you will always
   get with -current, and faced the last time too.

 - what about the switch to gcc4 makes you hesitate?  The fact that
   gcc4 might introduce or uncover additional problems (in which case,
   don't worry, because it's not yet the default), or the fact that
   you may want to upgrade again very soon once the default is
   changed, and you hesitate so as to wait and do the work only once?

As an aside, my concern with switching to gcc4 relates more to the
possibility of random pkgsrc things breaking than to the base system;
accordingly, I have so far only switched machines that don't use many
pkgs to gcc4 - and have had no problems with those.  When I have some
spare time I'll knock up another xen domU to test building all the
pkgs I use elsewhere with gcc4, and see how many break.

Finally, lets look at it another way.  We're (hopefully) nearing the
point where we can branch for 4.0, so an upgrade to current now will
be helping to test readiness for that branch, and you can divert later
updates onto that branch when it starts if you want to remain more
conservative from there.  Or, if you want to be more conservative now,
wait for that branch and update to there.

--
Dan.



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