Re: 80386 support

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> 1. It really probably is best to think of "small machines", be they
> old or not, as "embedded" targets to some degree, particularly if one
> wants to run any significant portion of NetBSD on them.  That does
> mean cross-compiling, of course, but that's trivial to do these days.

Best?  By what metric?

For the sorts of purposes for which I'd consider running NetBSD, if it
can't self-host, it's broken.

> 2. Memory and storage requirements for small systems is still
> _really_ low if you want to go to some slight effort.

...and don't care about more than booting and maybe running a couple of
tiny programs. 

> [...7M bootable image...12M ramdisk...]

A 12M ramdisk (plus the kernel) isn't my idea of "_really_ low".  My
idea of "_really_ low" is more like 2M.

> So, I would suggest that all excuses about NetBSD not still building
> for, and running on, tiny machines are just that:  excuses.

This sounds a lot like a variant of "my value of `satisfactory' is good
enough for everyone".

> Use a cross-compile host like any other tiny/embedded systems target
> must do and all will be A-OK.

Only for those for whom having to always cross-compile *can* be A-OK.

> [[ I do wish dropping i386 support had properly triggered a rename
> such that the "i386" port name was dropped at the same time and a
> more meaningful acronym were chosen instead, [...].  It should never
> be too late to fix such an egregious error.]]

With this, I agree.

In particular, resurrecting 80386 support as a separate port (which I
think I saw mentioned upthread) is rather difficult with the obvious
port name already in use by a port it no longer really applies to.

/~\ The ASCII                             Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML                mouse%rodents-montreal.org@localhost
/ \ Email!           7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B