Re. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-help/2003/08/21/0023.html

Unfortunately, the manual was probably right, depending on where he got his
CDs from.

NetBSD is not a product that you can buy in a store.  (Yes, you *can* buy a
product in a store that has NetBSD; I found 1.6 this way at a local Micro
Center earlier this year---but that's not "the" NetBSD product; there is
no such thing.)

The closest thing to "the" CD contents would be what you get on
the CD image from the NetBSD site.  But anyone (within export laws;
(^&) is allowed to burn & distribute their own CDs.  I burned one
"official" CD image of 1.6, then I found that I needed NetBSD
sources on my laptop to tweak the network interface driver, so I
burned a new CD with 1.6 binaries + sources.

When I saw a 1.6 boxed set at a local MicroCenter, I bought it on a bit
of a whim.  I opened the box to see what was in it, but haven't used
the CD's.  (I think that the set was sold by Daemon News, though I
got the impression that they were using Wasabi's disk layout.)

It might come in handy if I should find myself in possession suddenly of
a used Power Mac or the like.  (No fuss to build my own CDs, just use
the set I bought; (^&)


I suppose that this has good and bad sides.  The bad side is that NetBSD
is not a clearly defined, identifiable consumer product.  You could get
NetBSD from one source, and get a fairly up to date set of packages,
complete pkgsrc, maybe distfiles, bootable on a wide range of platforms.
You could get it from another source and get something that just
boots/installs on the i386 and installs the full system, but excludes
prebuilt packages and sources.  (This doesn't matter much if you
don't care whether NetBSD is ever a popular consumer system.)

The upside is that you *can* make specialized distributions.  A full
set of install binaries for all architectures is enough; full pre-built
binary packages for every architecture is probably going to run to quite
a few CDs.  Does one need to include NetBSD sources?  Most don't need
those immediately and can fetch them from the 'net, but some (like
my laptop) would really benefit from the sources on CD.  Some (like
me) just have i386s.  Others may not have any i386s, or may have a
heterogenous environment.  One CD set to satisfy everyone would have
to be big, but tailored sets to types of users can be smaller (hence easier
to set up & test, and perhaps fewer CDs to burn).


Well, that's my take on the matter.  (^&

(ramble)

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/