Re: ISC's EoL dhcp suite, including dhcpd

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> writes:

> Eh.  This is true only when you heatseek NetBSD itself; unlike NetBSD,
> pkgsrc does not, as far as I could[%] tell, keep old versions around.

That's not really true, but I can see why you have that impression.

pkgsrc the bits remain in the VCS.  If you want pkgsrc that works on
NetBSD 5 you can check out the branch from some date middle of NetBSD 6,
after everything's been fixed up but before the world has moved on from
5's compiler.  You may need to build things yourself, or you might
possibly find old binary sets on archive.netbsd.org.  But usually
machines with old NetBSD are server-types that don't do bloated things,
and it's not bad to build.

> [%] It's been a while since I looked; then, pkgsrc did not provide
> anything for NetBSD older than two or three versions, so I stopped
> looking.  If they've resurrected old versions, I'd be delighted
> (astonished, but delighted).

You can try to build pkgsrc-HEAD or a recent branch on any system you
like.  Programs whose upstreams have old-fashioned good judgement and
don't require C++23 to print hello world are likely to build ok.

If you mean "binary packages aren't built for old NetBSD versions", then
that's true, nobody is building/publishing those.  That's basically
because there is infinite work, finite workers, finite resources and
because ~nobody cares.

> At present, any old NetBSD version contains all[%] servers for the
> included clients - unsupported, but at least it works as well as it
> ever did.  Removing servers from /usr/src would mean that, once that
> NetBSD becomes old, it would be even more orphaned than it is now; once
> a version falls off the old end of pkgsrc's support, there's no
> apparent source for the source for it.  (Someone who anticipates the
> desire can archive pkgsrc along with NetBSD.  Someone who hasn't
> anticipated the need has no obvious way to recover.)

If you had it installed, and you didn't delete it, it's still there.

You're conflating "works from pkgsrc-HEAD" and "works from the version
of pkgsrc that is contemporaneous with the end of NetBSD N".
Source-wise, nothing is removed.



I can see the point of removing things that are EOL or troubled.  But we
don't really have a lot of servers, and I don't think we should be on a
rampage to rm them all.