Re: the nature of pkgsrc support for OS versions (release vs stable)

[Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

> So, the big question is:
>
>   Does pkgsrc need to support *building* on 8.0_RELEASE, even when that
>   version has bugs that are fixed in 8.X_STABLE, and it's not reasonable
>   to work around this?
>
> I would say no, that while pkgsrc should ideally be buildable on
> RELEASE, if the problem is a bug in RELEASE, then it's entirely
> reasonable to expect people *building packages* to update to a STABLE
> with the fix.

I agree, although ... I think that in the case of netbsd-8 (and our
maintenance branches in general), I would still pretend that the
bulk builder machine runs 8.0.  The easiest way is to override the
contents of sys/sys/param.h before locally building and rebooting
with a kernel based on netbsd-8 sources.  Especially if none of the
changes along netbsd-8 doesn't change ABIs, we can still pretend to
provide "backward compatibility" (8.0_STABLE, 8.1, 8.1_STABLE and
8.2 can run packages built on 8.0) but not relying on our non-
promised "forward compatibility", e.g. that packages built on 8.1
also work on 8.0.

Regards,

- Håvard