On Tue, Sep 26, 2006 at 10:09:25AM +0200, Dennis den Brok wrote:
> Maybe one could do the following in order to reduce the 
> pain developers appear to have with keeping old or exotic 
> ports up with architectural changes applied to MI code, 
> such as time-counters recently (which despite of what will 
> be said I consider a change still also useful for the 
> ports that will be mentioned):
> 
> If a certain port of NetBSD has proven mature and the 
> underlying platform is not subject to changes anymore, for 
> instance because it is discontinued vendor-wise, move(!) 
> the MD code for it to a new branch, along with a copy of 
> all MI code that builds and works for that platform.

That is not the problem, in fact the problem is the absolute opposite.
When a new port is generated not enough of the changes are factored
back into the MI code - leaving far too much code MD.

Factoring anything back to be MI is actually a problem due to the
number of ports that have inconsequental changes to certain functions,
and some differences between the ports (eg major numbers and the location
of the disklabel on an MBR disk) that really shouldn'y have been allowed
to happen.

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk