Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!news.umbc.edu!eff!news.kei.com!world!ksr!jfw From: jfw@ksr.com (John F. Woods) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: Status on discussed merge between NetBSD and FreeBSD Message-ID: <35237@ksr.com> Date: 15 Nov 93 13:57:38 EST References: <JKH.93Nov13222001.2@whisker.lotus.ie> <crt.753292942@tiamat.umd.umich.edu> <CGD.93Nov14085627@eden.cs.berkeley.edu> <CGHs3y.Au2@kithrup.com> <DERAADT.93Nov14110240@pain.agate> Sender: news@ksr.com Lines: 36 deraadt@fsa.ca (Theo de Raadt) writes: >In article <CGHs3y.Au2@kithrup.com> sef@kithrup.com (Sean Eric Fagan) writes: > Define "stable." How many major changes are checked in to each try a week? > How many minor changes? > A system can be buggy as hell, yet still be stable and desirable for that > one reason. >i can't answer this; you will have the ask the current users how stable it >is on daily/nightly basis. you don't have to take our word for it. Speaking as a -current user: NetBSD-current is as "stable"[sef] as I want it to be. While shared libraries were being hashed about during the past two weeks, my NetBSD-current system was absolutely "stable"[sef]: because I had absolutely no time to FTP changes. However, during that time, NetBSD-current was also "stable"[jfw] in that it entirely failed to crash despite my continual use of it as a news-, mail-, and mini-ethernet-hub. Many of the changes that render NetBSD-current "unstable"[sef] have been essential to the improvement in "stability"[jfw]; others of them (like the shared library stuff) have given me concern about "stability"[jfw] so I held off until people appeared to agree that they were "stable"[everyone but sef], then picked them up (much to the rejoicing of my /usr partition). Frankly, I'm happier with my definition of "stability"; when my system crashes, I don't really care how many changes were required to make it crash, nor am I comforted that keeping it from crashing would require a number of other changes; I just look at the blinking cursor and the legend "Hit any key to reboot" and mutter unprintables. >(a round of applause to Paul Kranenburg for his sunos-compatible shared >library code!) In particular, especial thanks to Paul Kranenburg for working with *both* FreeBSD and NetBSD, despite the apparent cantankerousness of some of each. I was personally dismayed to see the recent article crowing about FreeBSD finally having shared libraries, in an article that made it appear that this was a FreeBSD-specific development; I was also dismayed to see another recent article claiming that "unlike FreeBSD", NetBSD's shared libraries have been "working perfectly for two weeks", which (I think) overstated the case by quite a bit.