Re: Regarding the ULTRIX and OSF1 compats

[Maxime Villard <max%m00nbsd.net@localhost>]

Le 16/03/2019 à 14:43, Johnny Billquist a écrit :
> On 2019-03-16 14:28, Maxime Villard wrote:
> > I stated my point clearly and logically, about why certain things have
> > legitimate reasons to go away, regardless of whether they are compat layers,
> > or drivers, or something else. Rather than giving clear, logical counter
> > arguments, you are just repeating "XXX is YYY years old, remove it".
> >
> > You are going to have to provide better arguments I'm afraid, because you're
> > not going to convince _*anyone*_ with that.
>
> I think that what Robert, and others (including me) argument is actually that 
> things should not be removed, and the reason would be that this is the core 
> mission, purpose, reason (or whatever you want to call it) for NetBSDs 
> existence. Instead it should be fixed, because that is what it all is about. 
> Make it work - don't remove it.

It seems our disagreement comes down to that, indeed. It seems to me this has
already been answered to, too, in previous discussions.

"Make it work" -> No one has volunteered to make it work. No one is maintaining
it, no one is actively using it, no one is testing it. It's simple, no one is
here to "make it work".

"Don't remove it" -> If you have a suggestion on what to do, feel free to tell
me about it. As was said numerous times, dead wood consumes APIs and makes
stuff harder to change; the dead wood naturally deprecates even more because we
all make blind changes. It then reaches a state where it's broken beyond
repair, and there's just nothing else to do than retiring it. It may not be the
case for OSF1 right now, but it was certainly the case for SVR4, and it will
inevitably be the case for the few esoteric compat layers we still have.

It's good to think what you think, but you need to face reality. The reality is
that no one wants to take care of our compat layers (compat_linux being an
exception, maybe). No one has taken care of that in the last 10 years either.
Compat layers may have been a USP 20+ years ago, but a good number of them are
in a deplorable state nowadays, in addition to being of a questionable utility,
to say the least.

And don't even try to say "uh but this is YOUR reality and not mine", it would
just be ridiculous, these things have been discussed many times, and it's no
rocket science.