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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!osuunx.ucc.okstate.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!olivea!grapevine.lcs.mit.edu!ai-lab!life.ai.mit.edu!mycroft From: mycroft@trinity.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: changed a.out format and gdb 4.10 under NetBDS-0.9 Date: 27 Aug 1993 16:40:06 GMT Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 49 Message-ID: <MYCROFT.93Aug27124006@trinity.gnu.ai.mit.edu> References: <CCF4Av.8AH@hermes.hrz.uni-bielefeld.de> NNTP-Posting-Host: trinity.gnu.ai.mit.edu In-reply-to: uphya001@odie.uni-bielefeld.de's message of Fri, 27 Aug 1993 12:35:18 GMT Why was it necessary to change the format [...] 1) It makes executables an average of 4064 bytes smaller. 2) It makes *NULL core dump rather than just give strange results (which caught quite a number of bugs). 3) It's essentially the same as Sun and BSDI; it's hardly new. and writing an new execve procedure? The old one was just very poorly written, was not easily extensible, and didn't deal with protections correctly. Why it's not possible to concentrate all the energy to ONE operating system? Because everyone has a different idea of what they want to do. Why it is impossible to extend the distribution like Linux does, so everybody must not do the same time eating boaring porting job? I am in the process of rebuilding all the 3rd party software I had built (and was distributing) for 386BSD. When this is done I will post an announcement. Unlike the 386BSD archive I ran, the NetBSD archive will have separate source and binary sets for each package. The source sets contain backup files for anything which was changed from the distribution (except things like automatically generated `config.status' files), so you can generate diffs if you like. The binary sets contains all of the files normally installed when you `make install' the package, and in some cases (like FSP) a few other things you need in order to run it. I am also sending patches to the authors of the packages as I do them, so hopefully they will in the future come with integral support for NetBSD. One final note is that things which come as part of the NetBSD 0.9 package, like GNU cpio, GNU tar, etc., will *not* be provided as separate packages. I see no point in doing this. Nevertheless i think NetBSD is a really good and stable operating system! Thanks. B-)