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.
>
> Oh, good to hear!  The impression I had formed was that once a NetBSD
> version was old enough (something like two or three major versions),
> things like the patches necessary to adapt something to that version
> were *gone*.  I must have just not dug deep enough.

Not true in that

  we don't automatically force-remove patches because they are for
  netbsd 8 (now, with 9/10 "supported").  We would probably be removing
  patches for 5.  We might remove things if they made it hard to deal
  with.

  they remain in cvs history and on branches.  they are just removed
  from HEAD.

and, doctrine says -- but people often don't -- that patches to make the
foo upstream project build on NetBSD should be filed with foo.  So the
"need patches" problem is only when that didn't happen or foo isn't
healthy.  I'd say that at least 10% of the time they are properly filed
and upstream is ok!

> The major benefit of pkgsrc, from my perspective, was that it held
> patchsets that someone else had already worked out to make programs
> build on various NetBSD versions.  While they likely won't work out of
> the box on mine, they are likely to be much closer to working than
> unpatched code.

yeah, but it's a bug that the patches stay in pkgsrc.

> But, as I said, I'd formed the impression that that stuff was thrown
> away once a NetBSD version was old enough.  Good to be corrected!

some things dropped from HEAD, never from older branches

>> You're conflating "works from pkgsrc-HEAD" and "works from the
>> version of pkgsrc that is contemporaneous with the end of NetBSD N".
>
> Actually, no...
>
>> Source-wise, nothing is removed.
>
> ...*this* is where I went wrong.  I thought everything was thrown away
> once the underlying OS was old enough (where, of course, "old enough"
> varies).

If you mean "can i use HEAD with wicked old netbsd", then no, you will
find that some patches have been dropped.  And, the chance of upstream
wanting something newer in base POSIX conformance, base compiler, or
just something else increases.