Re: Removing ARCNET stuffs

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 5/29/15 5:22 AM, David Holland wrote:
> Because of these trends, I've been thinking for a while now that maybe
> it's getting to be time to fork.

Hello, David!

I started using NetBSD because of its small base system disk and memory
footprint, focus on security, support for many machine architectures,
ability to scale well to large SMP machines, support for a wide range
of deployments from embedded to server to desktop (it's a big time
savings to only have to learn and remember how to do something on one
OS instead of many), and genteel user and developer community.  I value
all of these things.  (Some benefits I came to appreciate later were its
relatively long support for a release and its package management system,
pkgsrc (writing a package once and having it work on all platforms I use
is a big win).)

Personally, I don't have an interest in running NetBSD on vintage
hardware.  However, I understand and respect that some people do, and
I have nothing against that.  I would very much so hope for NetBSD to
*not* fork!  I agree with Taylor Campbell: "I suspect if people have the
time and energy to make and maintain a fork, they certainly have the
time to write automatic tests for the old network protocols." [1]

In "Evolving Frameworks," [2] Don Roberts and Ralph Johnson suggest
in the "Tree Examples" pattern that you should never write a software
framework unless you have at least three applications that use it.  Part
of the reasoning is that these applications help you come up with the
proper abstractions for the framework.  If you think of NetBSD as a
framework and the machine architectures and hardware as applications,
then perhaps all of those "applications" can actually be a benefit to
NetBSD and help it to have really nice abstractions and design.

Of course, bit rot is bad, and I can certainly understand those who
would like to remove things that aren't used.  It's more work to
maintain those things, and, in some cases, it offers a bigger attack
surface to attackers.  I understand the argument that something can
always be restored from the attic if someone wants it, but the downside
of that is that, while NetBSD advances, deleted things remain as they
were when deleted and thus become more difficult to bring back over
time.  But if you have automatic tests as Taylor Campbell suggested,
those things could potentially stay in the tree, and changes can be made
to them with some level of confidence because the automatic tests still
pass.

Regards,

Lewis

[1] http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2015/05/29/msg018796.html
[2] http://st-www.cs.illinois.edu/users/droberts/evolve.html