Hi,

> Are there any opinions about whether 3.1 is ready for a production use?

I skipped 3 and went straight to 4 on a number of my machines. One is a 
colocated machine in Rotterdam, which is pretty far from Los Angeles if 
anything goes wrong, but moving from NetBSD 2 to NetBSD 4 remotely wasn't 
all that difficult. Next is to do a machine in New York.

> I have seen the upgrade procedures in sysinst (and postinstall), and they
> appear to be a great help to my upgrade plans.  If this will help
> me as much as I hope, I will have the option to move to 3.1
> quickly.

I didn't use sysinst, but postinstall is good for cleaning up leftover old 
files.

> Any opinions on this?  I need a stable box (24x7) - I want it to
> stay up for years without complaint.  My other NetBSD boxes on MacPPC
> stay up a long time.  I just retired one that had gone 503 days since the
> last reboot, and I think one of my 68K Mac IIci boxes went almost
> 3 years....  (The retiree is a Power Center 132 that has been in
> production since Jan 2001)

Most of us prefer long term stability over other things. Part of why I 
went straight to 4 was so that I could wait longer before feeling the need 
to do another major jump later.

> For what I want - web and ftp server, shell users, ppp dial-up - will
> 3.1 (or 4.x) be a big improvement?

I don't know if it'll be noticeably better - I can't say I see much of a 
difference between NetBSD 2 and NetBSD 4 - but some things seem to work 
MUCH more consistently, such as building stuff in the NetBSD source tree. 
While I'm not sure about PowerPC, NetBSD 4 does also seem a bit faster on 
m68k machines (m68040 mac68k, m68060 Amiga).

> Does anyone know if serial works reliably in 3.1 with older
> (PM7x00-class) machines?

No. You can still lock up the console in NetBSD 3 or NetBSD 4 by typing 
while getting output. That hasn't changed yet.

John
-- 
Today is the day that my destiny calls me!
   Meowth