On Thu, 13 Nov 1997, Mark H. Levine wrote:

> OK, then please let me ask what the philosophy is _here_ :).  In all
> seriousness, saying the toolchain is not part of the release is, in
> my view as a commercial adopter, shooting yourself in the foot with a
> shotgun, assuming that you still want this OS to be used by businesses.

Well, feel free to do the integration necessary to make it part of
the release. (The quick summary: make the current cygnus toolchain
do dynamic linking of a.out format executables, and then we can
replace the current in-tree toolchain and the alpha will then be
able to use it, instead of having to have its own separate toolchain.)

Yes, it's obvious the alpha port isn't as mature as the i386 or
sparc port is (both of which have the toolchain integrated). You
have three choices here:

    1. Fix the problems. If you need a list, send me e-mail; I can
    supply you with at least two solid years of work.

    2. Pay someone to fix the problems. Again, if you're interested
    in this contact me and I can get you hooked up with a developer.

    3. Wait until someone, of their own free will and good nature,
    fixes these. Generally these are people who, like me, have full
    time jobs and are working on this in their spare time, so don't
    expect things to happen instantly.

Oh, I suppose you do have a fourth option, which is to complain to
port-alpha, but I'm afraid that's effectively the same as number 3.

> But what I would like
> to try and suggest is that NetBSD as an organization and the Alpha port team
> as a group adopt a policy of bundling the toolchain, and its sources, with
> the NetBSD release (every snapshot!), always.

It's available at the same time. I can't make it part of the release,
because I'm not going to stick seventy megabytes of platform-specific
source code into our main source tree that is used by every platform.
Sorry.

I don't really understand what your problem is with this, anyway.
Is the system really unusable if you have to untar one more file
to do the install, and if some of the programs you use run from
/usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin? Can you explain to me exactly
how this makes life so difficult for you?

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca	   Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	   Through infinite myst, software reverberates
Vancouver, BC  (604) 257-9400	   In code possess'd of invisible folly.