[Oko]

I feel compel to respond to this well intended post which I believe contain some logical fallacies. None the less I think that the post is very valuable in the sense that it might help us understand how some of the inner circle NetBSD people think.

Originally Posted by ibara

Complaint: NetBSD should drop smaller platforms/"cruft".
Why? What sense does this make? Should OpenBSD drop their smaller platforms, like OpenBSD/loongson? Think really hard before you answer that question. If OpenBSD took your suggestions then I would not have had the opportunity to join the team. I got my account because I wanted to work on that platform so I did and got rewarded for that work. The OpenBSD/luna88k is essentially a labor of love from a single person. Why take that away?

There's some bizarre folk logic that says "if you take away what I think are the distractions then developers will work on the things I think are important." No. That's 100% wrong. Taking the Loongson platform away doesn't translate to me working on something else. It translates to me, and I am going to stress this, NOT WORKING ON ANYTHING. The things are are important to the developers (i.e. not you, i.e. the only people that actually matter in this discussion) would not be there. And they would have nothing to work on.

While I concur that some of your logic here is correct it also contains some logical flows. First one is that I am not aware that NetBSD project is for developers only unlike OpenBSD which publicly states that as one of its principals. Apart of the semantics the fact that Amiga developer might not be compelled to do any work after her/his favorite port is officially dropped that might also translate into 10 more capable ARM or AMD developers who are now sitting on the sidelines due to constrains imposed on the project by supporting hardware with serious technical limitations like Amiga or Atari.

Originally Posted by ibara

So I went and read the NetBSD CVS logs, clearly something none of you bothered to do, and there's real activity going on in the Amiga port. Go look for yourself: NetBSD/amiga. If people want to work on it, great! You don't get to control what other people voluntarily work on. Remember: the equation isn't "they work on amiga or they work on something else" it's "they work on amiga or they don't work."

This might be very well how many core NetBSD developers think. If that is the case NetBSD should be pronounced Archaeological OS. As such it might be very interesting to me when I want to fire my old Atari 1000 but has no relevance for my day job.

Originally Posted by ibara

And yes having those "dead archs" really matters. Because sometimes you find bugs you don't find elsewhere. And sometimes those bugs are bugs that affect all platforms. Yes, NetBSD would do better at finding those bugs if they did more native building but that's their decision to make.

This argument is frequently invoked by OpenBSD developers when somebody is trying to argue against some legacy ports (most recently Sparc). The major fallacy of your argument in my point of view is that unlike OpenBSD, NetBSD folks are actually doing very little native builds. As a member of inner OpenBSD circle you know all too well that no platform can be adapted as official platform until at least two physical machines of that type are not available to developers one of which has to be located in the famous Theo's rack. Are there any images of NetBSD rack that I am not familiar with with machines in all 56 or so different architectures NetBSD is officially supporting? For some of those architectures actual physical machines have never been built IIRC. OpenBSD has never been shy in cutting down legacy platforms for various reasons. Check out the attic. OpenBSD used to support Amiga too. I argue that supporting for old platforms is important as long as native builds are done and no major new features are prevented from being imported into the code base due to limitations of legacy platforms. There would be no faster way to infuriate OpenBSD community than to say that new packet queuing and prioritization can't be imported into the base because of limitations of Luna or Shark platforms. Even with current fairly reasonable policies we saw two recent forks of OpenBSD (defunct AerieBSD and Bitrig).

Originally Posted by ibara

And if someone else wants to work on ZFS or anything else and the project is willing to let them work on it in-tree then it's a sad day for you.

No it is not. I use ZFS to make living and if I can't get it from NetBSD I will get it from somewhere else. Again you are using your OpenBSD mantra "OS by developers for developers and everyone else is just for a good ride". NetBSD is officially not like that and some people would argue that was the main point of contention between Theo and the rest of core when he forked OpenBSD.

Originally Posted by ibara

If you don't like the direction NetBSD is headed, do something about it. Yeah, that's difficult. And it takes a lot of hard work and/or money (but sometimes not as much money).

The conference I helped organize and run this past year, NYCBSDCon 2014, was able to raise enough money to donate over $1100 to each of the four main *BSD projects. See our logo on the NetBSD donations page for 2014.

Or maybe donating your time and code? Maybe you're not a kernel hacker, but maybe how about one of you take it upon yourself to clean up pkgsrc on some platform you think is less than ideally supported. A friend of mine has been doing this with pkgsrc on PowerPC Mac OS X.

Seriously, go and do any of those things. Donate money or go donate your time and skills. Then come back and repeat any of that to me again. I dare you. You won't be able to because you'll finally have an appreciation for all those things you don't know and never think about.

I'm done. Don't make me come back to this thread.

I see no reason for vocabulary of threats. I am not afraid of you or anybody else for that matter. I have been supporting OpenBSD financially for a while like many people who frequent this forum arguably with small but reoccurring donations. It is a tool that I use at work. It is a tool that I like using, but it is a tool, no more no less. I would be happy to support NetBSD and I started this thread being a UNIX lover. At this point I personally see no piece of NetBSD worth of my support. What I am afraid is that my opinion is not isolated.