On Sun, 16 Apr 2000, David Maxwell wrote:

> Well, certainly two of the packages you mention are 'special' cases, at
> least in my way of looking at the package system. I'm referring to
> Mozilla and Kaffe. Mozilla is pretty early in development, and Kaffe has
> appeal to a more limited set of users. (xemacs should be pretty normal, I
> would have thought)

One would think, but one would be wrong. Xemacs (and emacs) does this
weird 'unexec' where it loads all of its options and then writes a new
executable out to disk based on the memory image. This is problematic,
because it involves reading/writing the object file format, which tends to
have platform dependencies even if it is supposedly a standard like ELF.

And building mozilla is not for the faint of heart. It seems that they
achieved platform independence by implementing a rather complete unix
runtime layer. It took forever to build (on my snappy 260,) ate up 300 meg
of disk, and still didn't work after I finally got it to link! It is
probably not a coincidence that the binary in the package collection is
from 10/98 or so!! 

Finally, I guess Kaffe only appeals to people who want to run Java on
NetBSD. 

At least gdb works, sort of...

;-)
Bob
just wanted an editor, a web browser, and java....
although I do like the KDE browser and I used it for a while.