Thanks for your replies. Ofcourse I'm not that worried. Just tossed a coin
to see if it got picked up :

My Q was:
>>What's happening with NetBSD lately? I saw 5 security advisories on NetBSD
>>within a week. What's fundamentally causing that?

One offered explanation:

>It's pretty normal after a virus scare I think.  Everybody starts looking over
>everything with a fine-toothed comb and sometimes it turns up something.
>One other way of looking at this "explosion of security alerts" is in
>terms of user numbers.  Few users will find few problems; many users have
>a better chance of finding >more problems. (After all, look at the number
>of problems reported against Windoze.) So this might be a side effect of a
>much wider use and distribution of NetBSD. ;-)  And some of the problems
>were reported against *BSD systems but in fact only affect some of the BSD
>variants and not all of them.


And Bill got this explanation:

>The fact that our security folks have gotten around to doing security
>advisories. :-)
>If you look close at the security advisories, you'll see one of them
>actually was in response to a FreeBSD advisory describing how a rogue
>process could block all processes from exiting. In 1994, NetBSD changed
>one of the System V subsystems in a way that limited the impact of the
>security advisory. Under NetBSD, only processes using a particular System
>V feature (semaphores I think) would be blocked. Since very few programs
>use them, very few programs can get so attacked.
>
>A lot of security advisories isn't necessarily a bad thing. If they are
>all comming with fixes, then it means the OS is staying on top of things
>and correcting problems.

---------------------------------------------------------
About broken things T@W wrote:
>>with every newer version and things which were ok in 1.3.*
>> crept in again (e.g.CAPS LOCK) and never get fixed.

And Bill scripted:
>1.4.2 did have problems. But 1.4.3 is probably going to happen, and 1.5
>will be starting soon. If you're running into problems, report them. If
>you can, fix them. :-)

Uhmf, alas my knowledge has not evolved that far yet. (.....banging head
against imaginary firewall.......)

SUNAGAWA Keiki san engraved digitally:
>What crop exactly is?  I searched NetBSD Problem database
>about port-mac68k and port-mac68k mailing list from March
>1999, but nothing found about that.  Did you ever file a PR?


 I've posted about this problem 3 times. ;(.
(around the time we reported the problems with du, df, top.)

If you want I'll virtually dig into my archives.

>>T@W> Should we switch?

And Bill scripted joyfully:
>Well, that's for you to decide. I'm certainly not switching. :-)

Ofcourse I'm not really planning to switch, mainly fishing (how cunning
;-}) for reactions, keeping up the pressure.

(in fact I did switch..........to NetBSD on i386)

T@W