Re: Regarding the ULTRIX and OSF1 compats

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Sat, 16 Mar 2019 09:45:07 +0100
    From:        Maxime Villard <max%m00nbsd.net@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <bf1f5843-ef6c-42a7-55ff-2deaacc6d881%m00nbsd.net@localhost>

  | > Emulating other systems is fundamental to what NetBSD is about.
  |
  | This is a really simplistic answer. It is not difficult to see that our
  | website does not reflect reality at all.

I'm sure that the wab pages have problems (somewhere) but when it comes
to the goals of the project, unless there has been some deliberate change
made I'm unaware of, they reflect what is important.

Further "unmaintained" is meaningless - for example there hasn't been
a sunstantive change to the libc strdup() function code in 19 years
(just changes to the copyright/licence notice since Jan 2000, and the
change then was to delete a redundant ';')    Oh no!   strdup() is
unmaintained, let's delete it...

If there are bug reports that are not being attended to (open PRs),
that's different.  Otherwise unmaintained code is simply code that
doesn't need changes (which for emulation of ancient systems is not
a huge surprise - those systems aren't changing any more, if the
emulation is adequate for its purpose - which does not mean it has
to be complete - then there is no reason for it to ever change again.)

Further, I agree that one of the big benefits of NetBSD is its ability
to run old userland binaries from systems that are no longer supported by
their vendors, and which (the original system) does not support currently
available hardware (which did not exist when it was last supported.)
NetBSD can support newer hardware at the OS level, and old userland,
which doesn't care what the hardware underneath is in any detail (just
the architecture) can keep on running - whether it is old NetBSD code,
or old original vendor code, or old 3rd party code.

kre