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nbsd4life

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I recommend using the package manager than building yourself. If something needs to be modified about the source, it will first be patched in the widely used package manager. convincing upstream to take in a patch & then waiting for a new version to be released with that patch takes time.

Ridiculous claim. A few months ago Gaza militants fired 460 rockets in one day, injuring 80 people (mostly civilians) and killing one, and the IDF has barely done anything besides bomb empty buildings.

When's the last time your country restrained itself after being hit by 460 rockets in one day?

Is it weird to support some of these today? we just dropped acorn26, although it was gone for a few years.

I think mips r3k has a better behaving add ("addu"), or is that only on some? if your compiler outputs these you don't have to worry about special behavior.

I'd say a bigger concern, for vax - the lack of IEEE754 is noticeable when people pick unsuitable float constants, or it traps by default. or the many GCC bugs now.

For mips r3k, the complete lack of atomics. And the load delays.

If you've ever been on the bad side of banks you'll dread this a lot. I merely had my credit card stolen but getting a replacement was surprisingly time-consuming and I'm glad I could still eat and travel until then.

Apple isn't the best example. They generally do publish the modified source code to FOSS projects they do, and sometimes they don't add their own license clause, so the changes can get merged back.

so you want a non-commercial use license. these aren't seen as open source by most people, but perhaps they'll be accepted by users.

calling it open source is harming actual open source projects by making people fear adopting them.

User-space RCU 8 years ago

That only refers to copyright, not the patent, right? I know FOSS projects avoiding a different implementation of RCU for patent reasons.

Phoebus cartel 8 years ago

The cartel tested their bulbs and fined manufacturers for bulbs that lasted more than 1,000 hours

If their motivations were pure, they would set a standard for efficiency and/or brightness, or a minimum but not maximum of 1,000 hours.

The way netbsd does GCC updates gives a really wide margin for figuring out compiler issues:

- Copy existing compiler into gcc.old

- Add new compiler as "gcc"

- Switch architectures one by one

If one architecture is left behind it's not a big pressing issue, you have until the next GCC update. They're done once 2-3 years hopefully so the GCC VAX issue taking 6 months to resolve wasn't close to being a problem.

As for removing architecture support, as long as it builds without extreme intervention, the non-VAX crowd is going to leave it alone. The VAX code is mostly separate in its own directory so doesn't get in the way.

The people who care about VAX within NetBSD are very knowledgeable and it would be a shame to alienate them without a good reason. They've contributed a lot of non-VAX stuff too.

BPG Image format 8 years ago

I doubt that Fabrice Bellard is getting a lot of money for his work. The money in open source goes to adding a feature in widely used projects. New projects have no users, so nobody to pay money.

NetBSD 8.0 took longer to release than intended.

The comparison to "oldest clang/gcc you can get in a linux distro" is not right, you can get a lot of different versions as packages. this refers to the base compiler which is used to build everything. GCC 8.1 is available as a package for example.

As for the base GCC versions, NetBSD is a little conservative when updating, but keep in mind that it's doing this on a lot of architectures and problems arise. a complete transition to GCC 5.x was held back somewhat by a tricky mipseb-softfloat bug, GCC 6.x (in -current) was held back by a VAX ICE. Newer GCC kills ARMv4-nonthumb support.

If that is OpenSSL 1.0.2k it probably should be updated, yeah.

It isn't a zero sum game with a finite number of FOSS idealists. Linux's popularity grew rapidly in what were previously proprietary software users. It didn't take away that much from BSDs.

Linux and other FOSS software becoming popular makes using NetBSD a lot more convenient, not less. There's a top tier FOSS browser that will accept NetBSD related patches, several really good document editors, graphical tools. We can even take some driver code from Linux itself.

it's probably a mistake that it got enabled there, I don't think the architecture has support for it. Even the edgerouter shouldn't, but don't quote me on it.

it's a nice OS, friendly community.

It's very easy to build and modify everything, it doesn't hide errors under a rug (syslog messages are legible, coredumps not disabled by default and so on), so I feel like I can tackle any problem I encounter on it.

Also, if you're the type that carries their long .xinitrc/.Xresources/.profile around, it's more comfortable than the friendly linuxes which require you to re-do everything but in dconf.

I do, I'm using dwm, firefox and urxvt.

I've got a lot of netbsd running machines. The one I use now is a Haswell CPU with nvidia graphics, and everything works well on it (even nvidia graphics!).

Not all machines are so good. I have a too new Dell XPS. It doesn't have graphical acceleration. But it was very cool to have the touchscreen working already (although with rough edges).