Re: Oldest Version with binaries still available?

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Chris Maness <christopher.maness%gmail.com@localhost> writes:

> I am wondering what is the oldest version that will run dpbox binary
> (part of the ported 3rd party binaries) without crashing.  So in that
> vein, I would like to install the oldest NetBSD that I can still fetch
> these pre-built packages from.  Any suggestions?

1) My suggestion is don't, but debug dpbox instead.
Try setting in mk.conf something like

  CFLAGS+=                -ggdb
  CXXFLAGS+=              -ggdb
  INSTALL_UNSTRIPPED=     yes

I speculate without even unpacking the tarball that there is code which
is technically invalid, but which on some systems happens not to cause
trouble.

There is no real future in running old code on old NetBSD; things are
just going to get worse.  Up to you what you want to try of course.

2) You may be able to find old binary packages at e.g.

  https://archive.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc-archive/packages/NetBSD/x86_64/

and it looks like NetBSD 7 for 2019Q3 is available.


3) You can install old NetBSD and check out old versions of pkgsrc and
build yourself.  My advice is to use a version of pkgsrc that is newer
than the release you are trying but not many years newer, and not newer
than two releases later.

> I would report this as a bug, but I am not sure there is a maintainer
> for dpbox and/or tnt.  It is crashing for me on 9.3.  It almost works,
> but tends to crash when a new user registers or it receives bulletins.

My view is that it's only a bug in pkgsrc if, when you get the upstream
tarball and build it according to the upstream build instructions, it
works, and when built from pkgsrc it does not.

Of coures, if pkgsrc doesn't have the latest upstream release, that's
also something to be fixed.

Beyond that, pkgsrc does modify upstream sources to work around bugs.
We don't have clear doctrine but as a maintainer I don't view "upstream
is buggy and pkgsrc hasn't fixed it" as a legit pkgsrc bug report.
Others likely have different views.

I have no idea if upstream still exists etc.